How West Hartford Went White

How a racially-diverse city got segregated

Today I would like to share what I have learned about how my whiteness was constructed. And, as always, I encourage my white friends to listen, really listen, to black and brown voices. Sometimes when you hear something again and again it becomes noise, but when you cut through the noise sometimes you can hear a signal you missed the first time.

My surname comes from an emigrant carpenter named Eugene O’Sullivan who came over during the famine. He lived in Fort Greene Brooklyn, where I live now, fought for the Union in the Civil War and settled in Hartford, CT among abolitionists Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain.

But the person who had the most impact on my community was a Wall Street stock broker named Foster Milliken Jr. who came to Hartford in 1936 as part of FDR’s Home Ownership Loan Corporation. FDR wanted the US out of the depression and he thought home ownership could be the foundation of wealth. He sent Milliken to map it out.

The Urban/Suburban lines in the area had never been quite firm. Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe thought of themselves as living out in the countryside. Their neighborhood was then called Nook Farm. Hartford had a huge coal-fired industrial center and winds that rained soot on the eastern edge of the river.