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Not Just From the South: the Great Black Migration to New England

In the early part of the 20^th century, entire church congregations from Americus, Ga., moved to Hartford during the great black migration north. Their pastors re-established themselves in the city as their parishioners got jobs in the surrounding defense plants and tobacco fields.

The story of an entire southern community migrating to a northern city is told often throughout the United States. From 1916 to 1970, 6 million African Americans moved from small southern towns to cities in the Northeast, Midwest and West.

For many, the great black migration was a journey from Jim Crow laws, lynchings, debt slavery and rural poverty to a somewhat better life in urban factories.

That, at least, is the simple version. In New England, the story gets a little more complicated. Migrants of color came not just from the American South, but from the Caribbean, Africa and the rural towns of New England. And they only came in large numbers until about 1930.

A map of the black percentage of the U.S. population by each state/territory in 1990. Black = 35.00+% Brown = 20.00–34.99% Red = 10.00–19.99% Orange = 5.00–9.99% Light orange = 1.00–4.99% Gray = 0.99% or less

Not Really Welcome

Before the great black migration north, people of color had already lived in New England. White New Englanders pushed them out with restrictive laws and few job opportunities. In 1755, for example, Africans made up 20 percent of the population of Newport, R.I., a major hub of slave trading. By 1900, only about 7 percent of Newport’s population was black.

The same held true in Hartford. Sociologist Charles S. Johnson wrote that Hartford had a larger black population proportionately in 1790 than in 1910. Whites took a “kindly and paternalistic” attitude to them, limiting their employment to servitude, he wrote. In 1800, blacks made up 4.5 percent of Hartford’s population; that number fell to 2.4 percent by 1900.

Boston was no different. In 1790, the year of the first census in that city, 4.2 percent of the population was black. In 1900, it fell to half that – 2.1 percent.

A map of the black percentage of the U.S. population by each state/territory in 1900. Black = 35.00+% Brown = 20.00-34.99% Red = 10.00-19.99% Orange = 5.00-9.99% Light orange = 1.00-4.99% Gray = 0.99% or less Magenta = No data available

But Boston’s African American population did grow slowly after the Civil War. Its strong abolitionist tradition attracted black people, and they were not legally denied the right to vote when the war ended. The Legislature In 1885 even passed a law forbidding discrimination in public places on the basis of race.

Such civil rights leaders as William Monroe Trotter, W.E.B. Du Bois and, later, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., spent significant time in Boston. But they couldn’t prevent the decline of the Boston area’s manufacturing base, which drove its prosperity and provided at least some opportunity for people of color.

Big Cities

The North and the West experienced two great black migrations in the 19^th century. The first started in 1910, swelled with the advent of World War I and then declined in the early 1930s. The second went from 1941, when wartime manufacturing again attracted black migrants, and lasted until 1970.

Only the first wave really came to New England. During the second wave, the only New England cities to experience slightly more than a one percent increase in their black populations were in Connecticut: Stamford, Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven. And many New England cities saw a decline.

During that first wave, tens of thousands of African Americans from the South came to New England’s cities. But so did rural black New Englanders. Between 1915 and 1930, entire counties in New England became whiter even as the region as a whole got darker.

Train Arrive

During the first great black migration from the southern United States, most African Americans came by train. A statue of A. Philip Randolph in Boston’s Back Bay station testifies to the importance of the railroads as well as the African American Pullman porters who rode them. The porters shepherded the unsophisticated country folk to Philadelphia, New York, Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven, Providence and Boston. Under Randolph, they also formed the first all-black union in 1925, a key development in the Civil Rights movement. (Malcolm X worked as a Pullman porter for about a year in 1943.)

Much of the great black migration in the early 19th century happened by train

The farther the black traveler went, the more it cost. That partly explains why Boston attracted a smaller percentage of African Americans than Philadelphia or New York—or even the southern New England cities.

Another reason Boston didn’t quite have the pull of industrial centers like Chicago or Detroit was that its manufacturing fell into decline. But Connecticut’s burgeoning defense industries were on the upswing.

From 1910 to 1940, the cities that experienced the largest growth in black population included Hartford, with a 23.6 percent increase. New Haven grew 22.4 percent and Bridgeport 13.8 percent. The others: Boston at 13.2 percent; Stamford 8.4 percent; New London, Conn., 8.2 percent; Waterbury 8.1 percent; and Providence 6.3 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Today, Connecticut has the largest black population in New England. It rose from 1.7 percent in 1900 to 9.1 percent today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Tobacco

One reason Connecticut, and Hartford in particular, attracted so many southern blacks: Connecticut shade tobacco.

Tobacco growers relied on European immigrants to harvest the tobacco around Hartford. But then World War I broke out, and immigrants who worked the tobacco farms returned to Europe to fight the war. Or they went to work in brand-new defense plants that paid 65 cents an hour and guaranteed two years of work.

The tobacco growers needed help, and they went for it to the National Urban League, formed in 1911 to help resettle black migrants.

The Urban League went to historically black college administrators like John Hope, president of Morehouse College, for seasonal tobacco workers in Connecticut. That began a long relationship with African-American students—like Martin Luther King, Jr.—who came to work summer jobs and get a taste of living free from Jim Crow. Eventually growers found they needed year-round workers, so southern black families began to move to Hartford.

The old Winchester Repeating Arms Co., in New Haven.

But other than servitude and tobacco, the opportunity to get an industrial job in a tool or firearms factory ‘receded to an almost hopeless distance,’ wrote Charles Johnson, who in 1921 wrote The Negro Population of Hartford, Connecticut. But then in 1916, Connecticut’s factories faced a severe crisis as the labor shortage worsened.

Black tobacco workers drifted from the tobacco fields to the defense manufacturers, but mostly doing unskilled work in the coal yards and lumber yards, or as teamsters and porters. When the war ended, they got laid off first.

By 1921, 60 percent of companies surveyed hired no blacks, according to Johnson.

A Sociologist’s View of the Great Black Migration

Johnson was the first black president of Fisk University. Before that, he studied the plight of those who came north in the first great black migration to Connecticut, focusing on Hartford.

Charles S. Johnson

Though the newcomers had many skilled tradesmen among them, they found jobs off limits to them at the Winchester Repeating Arms Co., New Haven Clock Co., and the New Haven Box Co. Some, like Colt’s Patent Firearms Manufacturing Co., Pratt & Whitney and the Royal Typewriter Co., preferred to hire African Americans only to perform unskilled duties such as custodial work, Johnson wrote.

Southern blacks had it harder than the Connecticut natives. The men wore overalls and women wore dust caps and aprons outside of the house—simply not done in the urban North.

The southerners, wrote Johnson, ‘were crude and ungainly, many of them boisterous, with strange habits of dress and manners altogether repellent to the older Negro residents inured to the refinements of the city.’

However, he wrote, the green soon rubbed off.

Most of the newcomers came from Georgia, but one-third as many came from Virginia. Americus, Ga., in particular sent blacks to Hartford.

Housing Problems

Southerners Johnson described as ‘crude laborers, loafers and ne’er do wells’ moved into neighborhoods vacated by the better-off natives.

The conspicuously successful, he wrote, didn’t live together, but forged close bonds with each other.

The newcomers lived along the Connecticut River in housing that Johnson described as among the oldest and most deteriorated sections of the city. Houses had few bathtubs or working toilets, and residents complained of leaking roofs, defective plumbing, fallen plaster and trash in the alley or yard.

Another neighborhood, the old red light district, he described as lower class but full of strivers. Hardworking families lived next to a ‘vicious and criminal element’— prostitutes, gamblers and bootleggers.

Southern blacks got blamed for anything bad that happened. “If a crime was committed it was assumed to have been committed by a Southern Negro,” wrote Johnson.

The Great Black Migration to Boston

During the Civil War, Boston had a black population of mariners, skilled craftsmen and servants who lived on Beacon Hill. Around 1900, they moved to the South End and Roxbury neighborhoods. Southern migrants, many from Norfolk, Va., joined them in Roxbury.

New England, and Boston in particular, had for centuries developed deep connections to Caribbean plantations. In the early 20^th century, the United Fruit Company had a direct steamer service between Boston to Kingston and Port Antonio, Jamaica.

So Boston’s West Indian community began to emerge around 1910. Immigrants from Barbados and Jamaica moved into the Roxbury neighborhood and formed St. Cyprian’s Church, after white Episcopalians discriminated against them. In fact, black migration to Boston in the teens and 20s mostly came from the Caribbean, Cape Verde and South America.

Boston’s Second Wave

Some Southern blacks also arrived in the Boston area to work in the local shipyards during World War II. The Charlestown Navy Yard, for example, employed 2,000 black workers during the war, out of a total workforce of 47,000 people. The gigantic Fore River ship yard only hired black workers in the temporary auxiliary yards.

By the 1950s, Boston’s Afro-Caribbean population grew to 5,000 — 12 percent of the city’s black population.

But federal immigration laws passed in 1922, 1924 and 1952 restricted the influx of West Indians. Then in 1965, Congress eased the restrictive quotas. Family reunification laws allowed Jamaicans and Barbadians to come to Boston, settling in Crosstown in the South End and Cambridgeport in Cambridge. Then, as Jewish families moved out of Roxbury, Dorchester and part of Mattapan, West Indians moved in. They also moved to the Massachusetts cities of Randolph, Malden and Brockton.

The Boston Red Sox’ Big Papi, David Ortiz, was born in the Domincan Republic.

In the 1970s, Haitians began migrating to Boston. By the 1980s, Boston had the third largest Haitian-American population in the country and the fourth largest Dominican-American population. Lawrence, Mass., and Providence also have a sizable Dominican presence.

Cape Verdean Communities

Cape Verdeans established communities in New England during the whaling days of the 19^th century—New Bedford and Providence, especially, but also into Connecticut. The trickle of Cape Verdeans grew into a flood in the early 20^th century due to poverty, drought and starvation. They worked in cranberry bogs, on the waterfronts and in the textile mills.

They moved to Hartford, where Charles S. Johnson found them in an undesirable neighborhood of African Americans from the South and Portuguese from the Cape Verdean and Canary Islands.

As in the case of Afro-Caribbean migrants, immigration restrictions slowed the arrival of Cape Verdeans in New England.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 initiated another great black migration: a new wave of Cape Verdean migrants. By 2010, New England cities account for every one of the 12 biggest Cape Verdean communities in the United States. In descending order, they are: New Bedford, Boston, Brockton, Pawtucket, Fall River, Taunton, Wareham, Providence, Randolph, East Providence, Central Falls and Bridgeport.

Former second baseman and manager for Major League Baseball Davy Lopes. He is of Cape Verdean descent and grew up in East Providence.

Universal Negro Improvement Association

Discrimination and inequality convinced many black people in New England they’d never receive fair treatment in the United States. A colorful, controversial Jamaican named Marcus Garvey had a message that appealed to them: they should be proud, they should achieve economic self-sufficiency, and they start another great black migration back to Africa.

Marcus Garvey

Garvey in 1914 created the Universal Negro Improvement Association to spread his message. In Connecticut, it had active chapters in Hartford, New Haven, New Britain, Portland, East Granby, and Rockville.

Garvey also helped establish the African Orthodox Church in Boston. St James African Orthodox Church moved into the Highland Park neighborhood of Boston 15 years after Garvey died in 1940.

Civil rights lawyer Constance Baker Motley remembered her parents’ friends following Garvey. She grew up in the Dixwell neighborhood of New Haven. Her father, from Nevis, thought Garvey a fool.

Constance Baker Motley

A Great Black Migration to Africa

Going back to Africa wasn’t a new idea, and it wasn’t just an African idea. Thousands of African Americans resettled in the West African country of Liberia. Now many of their descendants have returned to Rhode Island

In the early 19^th century, the American Colonization Society wanted to send ship former slaves to Arica. The ACS, in fact, helped found Liberia, where it sent shiploads of African Americans beginning in 1821.

Though most African Americans opposed colonization in Africa, some didn’t. A successful mixed-race entrepreneur, Paul Cuffe of Westport, Mass., supported the movement as well. He took 38 people from the U.S. black community to Sierra Leone in 1815.

Paul Cuffee (illustration)

In 1826, a group of Africans from Newport, R.I., left for Liberia. All perished of coastal fever within a year.

In the end, about 12,000 African Americans immigrated to the settlement that became Liberia. They declared independence in 1847 and in 1872 called themselves a free republic. The African Americans emerged as a political elite, but didn’t coexist peacefully with the indigenous people. From 1979 to 2003, Liberia went through bloody unrest, a coup, Ebola and two civil wars.

Great Black Migration from Liberia

Liberians started another great black migration to Rhode Island, the former slave-trading capital of the North American British colonies.

Rhode Island’s black population has more than doubled since 1900, from 2.1 percent to 4.5 percent. Pawtucket is 16.4 percent black, while in Providence people of color account for 13.3 percent of the population.

Now Rhode Island has the largest population of Liberians per capita in the U.S., which has an estimated 15,000 Liberians within its borders. The state, and particularly Providence, serves as the hub of the Liberian presence in the United States.

Late in 2019, Congress approved a Trump administration proposal to grant 4,000 Liberians a path to citizenship in the United States.

This story was updated in 2022.

Maps: 1990 By Blank_US_Map.svg: User:Theshibboleth – This file was derived from: Blank US Map.svg:, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20424896 By Blank_US_1900 Map.svg: User:Theshibboleth – This file was derived from: Blank US Map.svg:, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20424565; Davy Lopes By Keith Allison from Hanover, MD, USA – Dusty Baker, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58682216.

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Monhegan Murder Mystery: What Did Rockwell Kent Know?

In 2013, Jamie Wyeth’s new portrait of Rockwell Kent on Monhegan Island, paintbrush and palette in hand, was exhibited at the Brandywine River Museum of American Art. (See it here.) In the background a body was falling off a cliff. The body belonged to Sally Maynard Moran, a former mistress of Kent. Wyeth denied he was suggesting Kent killed Moran in an unsolved Monhegan murder.

He explained it was simply part of his series about “untoward events that have occurred on Monhegan over the years and this, of course, is one of them.”

The Red House, watercolor by Jamie Wyeth, 1972

Rockwell Kent

Rockwell Kent was born 1882 in Tarrytown, N.Y., to a relatively affluent family. He studied at Columbia University and at the Art Student’s League. In 1903, he also had an apprenticeship with Monadnock painter Abbott Handerson Thayer.

Rockwell Kent around 1920

Kent found inspiration in nature, and read deeply in the works of Transcendentalist philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

In 1905 he moved to Monhegan Island off the Maine coast, where he built several cottages and a large house at the water’s edge, known today as the Red House.

Success

His paintings of the island won critical acclaim. He moved on to paint other landscapes that inspired him: in Minnesota, Newfoundland, Alaska, Vermont, Tierra del Fuego, Ireland and Greenland.

In 1926, publisher R.R. Donnelley asked Kent to illustrate Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. Kent, who loved maritime adventure, suggested Moby Dick instead. The publisher agreed, and Kent set about studying whaling lore and history. His illustrated an edition of Moby Dick, released in 1930, that sold out immediately.

He was also in demand as a magazine illustrator. Under the name Hogarth, Jr., he created whimsical pen-and-ink drawings for Vanity Fair, New York Tribune, Harper’s Weekly and Life.

Red Baiting

But Rockwell Kent became increasingly radical and outspoken during World War II. He took an increasingly active role in progressive politics, and he remained patriotic toward the United States.

Island Village by Rockwell Kent, courtesy Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

After the war he advocated friendship and peace with the Soviet Union. U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy targeted him during the red-baiting era, and his reputation suffered. Once one of the most famous, well-paid artists of his day, he was no longer in demand as an artist or illustrator.

Brewing Storm by Rockwell Kent. Courtesy Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

In the summer of 1953, Sally Maynard Moran visited Monhegan. She stayed at one of the cottages the artist still owned, joined by his daughter, Mrs. Kathleen Finney, and her children. One day she announced she was going to take a walk. She was never seen again alive.

Three weeks after she disappeared, her body was discovered floating in the ocean off Portland Light.

“Mrs. Sally Maynard Moran, 49, New York society figure whose disappearance from the artists’ colony was a sensation last July, was murdered and thrown into the sea on the Maine coast, officials announced today,” reported the Chicago Tribune on Oct. 4, 1953.

Monhegan Murder

Pathologists had determined she died of blunt force trauma to the head. They said she couldn’t have fallen from Monhegan’s 100-foot cliffs, because her body would have had multiple bruises and fractures. The only other injury Sally Moran suffered was a broken arm.

Investigators learned two strange men were seen walking near the Kent cottage on the night of her death. An islander heard a voice shout, “Get your hands off me.”

Did Rockwell Kent have something to do with the murder of Sally Maynard? The rumor dogged him for years.

Monhegan’s rocky shore

The theory about the Monhegan murder had several flaws. One was that Kent was in New York at the time of Sally Maynard’s death.

Another was that she wasn’t murdered – at least according to her grandniece, Martha Wolfe of Winchester, Va. The Kennebec County attorney general gave Wolfe copies of the cold case file in 2006. Wolfe then pored over the files and concluded her great-aunt’s death was an accident.

Kent and his wife believed she committed suicide because she couldn’t face leaving the island. They had gotten her a job as a secretary because her ex-husband’s business reverses lowered her alimony. Sally Maynard Moran had allen into despair and uncertainty, her psychiatrist told the Kents.

Kent and Wyeth

Rockwell Kent sold the Monhegan cottage after Sally Moran died. He never returned to the island. From his 40s on he lived and painted at the Adirondack farm he called Asgaard. He died of a heart attack in 1971.

Jamie Wyeth long found Kent fascinating. He collected Kent’s work and even bought a house owned by Kent on Monhegan. In 1972, he painted The Red House.

Then in 2013, the Brandywine River Museum of American Art in Chadds Ford, Pa., held the exhibit featuring Wyeth’s portrait of Kent, titled, Jamie Wyeth, Rockwell Kent and Monhegan.

This story about the Monhegan murder mystery was updated in 2022.

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U.S. Figure Skating: From a Flooded Field in Cambridge to the Olympic Games

Figure skating in America owes much to the flooding of a field belonging to a daughter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the winter of 1897.

Maribel Vinson Owen

Annie Longfellow Thorp’s field at the corner of Mount Auburn and Willard Street was the foundation of the Cambridge Skating Club. On that iced-over field, demonstrations of the international style of skating were held. Ultimately, those demonstrations propelled U.S. skaters into world-class competition.

Just across the Charles River, the storied Skating Club of Boston would later produce many of the heroes and heroines of Olympic figure skating contests.

Figure skating is the oldest and most popular Olympic winter sport. It developed in the United States with considerable help from New England’s skating clubs – particularly Boston, Cambridge and New Haven. Skating clubs in New York and Philadelphia were also crucial. But members of the New England clubs relentlessly promoted figure skating — and won plenty of competitions in the process.

Aristocratic Englishmen

Figures skating was a traditional sport in Northern Europe. During the 19^th century, figure skating became a sophisticated form of recreation for aristocratic Englishmen.

It dates to the 14^th century in Holland. Then the Dutch attached steel blades instead of animal bones to their boots to glide along the ice. In the 1660s, English royalists sought refuge in the Netherlands after Oliver Cromwell’s Glorious Revolution. They learned the Dutch roll – skating side-to-side – on steel skates. Then they brought both skate and roll back to Britain during the Restoration. Skating became popular among British aristocrats and clergy, who invented new figures.

The Skater by Gilbert Stuart

The first skating club was formed in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1744. The first book on skating was then published in 1772 in London. During the 19^th century, two styles of skating emerged: the English style, which emphasized rigid body carriage, and what came to be known as the international style, which stressed artistry and fluid motion. The American style was also evolving, a quicker, more relaxed way of figure skating. Benjamin West, a Philadelphia artist, demonstrated the American style to the delight of Londoners in the years before the American Revolution.

The first U.S. skating club was formed in Philadelphia in 1849. The Cambridge club was the second. Within 25 years of the first flooding of Mrs. Thorp’s field, the club’s president would spearhead the formation of the United States Figure Skating Association and the United States would have its first Olympic figure skating medal.

Browne and Brokaw

George H. Browne was not only a Harvard graduate and president of the Cambridge Skating Club, but founder and headmaster of the Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge. He would use his organizational and writing skills to popularize figure skating in America – and then some.

In 1900, he wrote the first U.S. handbook on how to figure skate. Two years later, he took a sabbatical to St. Moritz, Switzerland, where he studied the international style of skating. He came home and put on the first American demonstration of it with New York skater Irving Brokaw at the Cambridge Skating Club. Browne and Brokaw wrote guides to the new style and collaborated to demonstrate it across the country. Brokaw was the only North American to compete in the figure skating competition in the 1908 Olympic Games, finishing sixth.

Browne and Brokaw made fashionable the international style of skating in Boston. To accommodate the new vogue, the Back Bay elite in 1911 built one of the first artificial skating rinks and created the Skating Club of Boston. Over the years the club would produce more national champions than any skating club in the country and send six skaters and coaches to the World Figure Skating Hall of Fame.

In 1914. Browne organized the International Figure Skating Championships of America at the two-year-old New Haven Skating Club. Theresa Weld, daughter of Boston Skating Club President Winsor Weld, won that first championship. She went on to win the bronze medal in the 1920 Summer Olympics. From 1923 to 1963, Weld promoted figure skating as the volunteer editor of Skating magazine, at first publishing it out of her home in Brookline, Mass.

Golden Age of American Skating

Though Europeans dominated figure skating during the first half of the 20^th century, Americans came into their own at the half point. Carol Heiss and Hayes and David Jenkins won Olympic gold medals during the ‘50s. Two of the era’s biggest stars, Dick Button and Tenley Albright, trained at the Skating Club of Boston. (Click here for Tenley Albright’s story.)

Theresa Weld

Button, a New Jersey native, had won the U.S. championship in 1946 at the age of 16 and planned to attend Yale University. He’d been told he could continue to compete in college if his grades were good. Then he was told he couldn’t. Members of the Skating Club of Boston persuaded him to enter Harvard instead. He did, training at the club, commuting to Harvard and winning Olympic gold medals in 1948 and 1952. Button brought a new athleticism to the sport. In 1948 he was the first to execute a double axel in competition and the first triple jump in 1952. He graduated from Harvard in 1952.

Tragedy

Boston Skating Club members continued their string of successes in 1961 as part of the U.S. Figure Skating Team. Headed to Prague on Feb. 15 for the World Championships were the 18-member team and 16 family members, coaches and officials. Their Boeing 707 crash landed on a field near the airport, killing all 72 people aboard. Lost in the tragedy were Boston Skating Club members Maribel Vinson Owen of Winchester, a 1932 Olympic bronze medalist and coach; her two daughters, reigning U.S. ladies champion Laurie Owen and reigning U.S. pairs champion Maribel Owen; Maribel’s partner, Dudley Richardson; and reigning U.S. men’s champion Bradley Lord.

Seven years later, Peggy Fleming brought the United States back to figure skating prominence, winning the Olympic gold medal in ladies’ singles. Eight years later another New Englander, Dorothy Hamill, of Greenwich, Conn., won an Olympic gold medal. The Skating Club of Boston produced such recent Olympic stars are Nancy Kerrigan, winner of silver and bronze medals, and Paul Wylie, the 1992 silver medalist.

In 2014, the Skating Club of Boston sent Marissa Castelli of Cranston, R.I., and Simon Shnapir of Sudbury, Mass., to the Winter Olympics. They then won bronze medals in the team figure skating event.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Girl Power: The 1933 New Haven Garment Workers Strike

In 1933, a poor Italian-American teenager led the dramatic New Haven garment workers strike that lifted thousands of women into the middle class.

Jennie Aiello wasn’t the only leader of the New Haven garment workers strike of 1933. But she was certainly a key to its success.

On a cold day in April, Jennie slid down the clothing chute from the second-floor cutting room of the huge Lesnow Brothers shirt factory to rally the stitchers on the first floor to strike.

The month-long Lesnow Brothers strike that followed climaxed a series of successful job actions during 1933.

The wave of strikes resulted from cooperation between two labor unions, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. From 1933 on, the unions’ two New Haven locals were central to their members’ political and social lives until the garment industry’s demise in the early 1990s.

New Haven

New Haven by 1933 had a long and storied labor history. In 1884, women shoemakers struck the L. Candee Rubber Boot Company. In 1886, strikes engulfed the city at 29 businesses. That year, The New York Times reported, “This town has picked up the reputation lately of having more strikes than an (sic) other city of its size in the country.”

New York City was the center of the garment industry, but in the 1920s so-called “runaways” moved to Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania so they could pay workers less. New Haven attracted clothing manufacturers because of its cheap factory space. The city also had a large pool of poor African Americans and Polish and Italian immigrants. Employers could get away with paying low wages because hardware and weapons makers had floundered after World War I.

The Great Depression

By 1933, workers grew increasingly desperate as the Depression sent mainstay employers reeling. Sargent Brothers Manufacturing laid off workers and L. Candee Rubber Co. went under. In 1931, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company went into receivership.

Jennie Aiello’s family suffered through the hard times. Her parents had emigrated from Italy and periodically relied on relief to support their seven sons and seven daughters. Jennie’s older brothers got work through the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the garment factories.

Jennie and her six sisters quit school at 13 or 14 to work in the Wooster Square shirt shops. Only the youngest sibling, Nick, would graduate from high school.

Thousands of men and women then worked in New Haven’s needle trades centered on Wooster Square. During the early years of the Depression, New Haven led the state in the number of work certificates issued to young women, 20 percent of whom were under the age of 16.

new-haven-garment-workers-wooster-square

Welcome to New Haven’s Little Italy, Wooster Square

Sweat Shop

Jennie Aiello and her sister Lucy went to work for Lesnow Brothers, the largest garment employer in Connecticut. The company employed 550 mostly very young women in the heart of New Haven’s garment district.

It was a sweat shop: dangerous, unsanitary, unventilated and unheated.

Wages were low and hours were long. Spreaders in the cutting rooms, where Jennie worked, earned $4.50 for a 54-hour week ($80.63 in today’s equivalent). Cuff turners earned $4 for a 60-hour week (today’s equivalent of $71.68). The work was seasonal and employees had to take long layoffs.

One worker remembered Harry Lesnow as “cruel, very ugly.” He’d come around the shop floor and yell “Get the hell!” if a worker went to get a drink of water.

Jennie was one of the eight or 10 girls at Lesnow Brothers who led the drive to form a union. They would quietly ask workers to join them outside the building to talk. They met secretly in Waterside Park on Saturdays.

Before the Strike

A great deal of preparation preceded the New Haven garment workers strike.

Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), had begun a campaign in 1932 to organize the runaway clothing manufacturers in neighboring states. He sent his wife Bessie to help organize New Haven, where she had family ties. Young Italian women came from nearby cities to help organize.

By 1933, the ACWA and the ILGWU had already organized four small contract shirtmakers in New Haven.

But the Lesnow workers faced daunting obstacles in their union drive. Even talking about a union cost workers their jobs. Parents feared letting their daughters strike because they so desperately needed their meager income.

Italian-speaking union officials went to the parents’ homes to persuade them to support the action.

Lena Riccio was a 15-year-old who earned a few dollars a week at Lesnow Brothers and handed over her entire pay envelope to the family.

“We were afraid,” she said. “You didn’t know who to listen to.”

The male organizers’ high pressure tactics frightened her, while the boss threatened to fire them. Some of the girls pretended to go to meetings to talk about the union, but instead hid out in a candy store, she said.

One organizer, Jennie Formichelli from Bridgeport, talked nicely to the girls. After weeks of indecision, Lena finally decided to join the union effort.

Sidney Hillman planned the New Haven garment workers strike.

New Haven Garment Workers Strike

The Lesnow Brothers provoked the New Haven garment workers strike at the beginning of April. The company demanded additional piecework from the workers without paying them more.

Jennie Aiello was working on the second floor as a cutter when she decided to walk off the job. Workers who sided with the company tried to block her. She dodged them, sliding down the chute with bales of unfinished shirts. She then rallied her friends on the first-floor stitchery to join her.

That began a month of police intimidation while picketing in the cold. If any strikers marched out of the line, the police hit them with billy clubs. They targeted the male leaders, but didn’t spare the women.

The anti-union New Haven Register barely covered the New Haven garment workers’ strike. The school district wouldn’t allow strikers to meet in the school auditoriums. They couldn’t get permits to assemble in a park for a rally. Male workers and some of the women stayed on the job.

Jennie Aiello walked the line along with the union organizers and other workers during that cold spring. The Saint Trofemina and Saint Andrew social clubs let them come in and get warm, drink coffee and eat a sandwich before going back out on the line.

Momentum

The strikers held together, and momentum began to turn in their favor. On April 18, the ACWA called for a nationwide strike of unorganized shirtmakers. By Monday, April 24, striking workers closed nearly all of the New Haven shirt companies.

The Connecticut State Board of Education sided with the strikers, notifying the labor commissioner that school-age children were working in factories. A letter from the school board described a “little girl” working for the LeRoy Shirt Company who earned 37 cents for working 24 hours.

The most dramatic confrontation of the strike probably happened on May 1, when Yale Divinity students joined the striking Lesnow workers on the picket line. Strikers from other shirt companies swelled their ranks.

That day, the height of the New Haven garment workers strike, Lesnow’s male employees decided to join the revolt and walked off the floor. Lesnow Brothers then had to shut its doors.

By May 3, Lesnow’s signed a contract with Sidney Hillman and Jacob Potofsky, another ACWA official. The workers got a 10 percent wage increase, health insurance and a pension. A year later, a new garment industry code shortened their days to 35 hours a week in the dress industry and 40 hours in the shirtmaking business.

Within six weeks of the Lesnow strike, virtually all of New Haven’s shirt companies were union.

Later that year, the ILGWU called for a general strike. According to the Greater New Haven Labor History Archives, there were strikes in all of the city’s dress shops. After two weeks of rallies, pickets and a shutdown of the industry in New Haven, the ILGWU represented all the dressmaking workers in the city.

What Happened Next

Jennie Aiello got married. Her younger brother Nick became the business agent for ACWA Local 151, a pillar of the Connecticut labor movement. He spearheaded the Greater New Haven Labor History Project, which included the story of the New Haven garment workers strike.

In 1939, Lesnow’s moved to Easthampton, Mass.

During the 1970s and ’80s, garment makers ran away to the South. Later, they moved to the Pacific Rim and South Asia for extremely low wages and dangerous working conditions. In 2013, more than 1,000 factory workers were killed in Bangladesh when their building collapsed.

The ACWA merged with the Textile Workers Union of America, which then merged to form UNITE, which since merged with the hotel workers’ union to become UNITE HERE.

With thanks to “Learning To Forget Schooling and Life in New Haven’s Working Class,” by Stephen Lassonde, Karen Pastorello in The Power Among Them and Anthony Riccio’s The Italian American Experience in New Haven.. This story about the New Haven garment workers strike was updated in 2022. Image of ILGWU label By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41361646.

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