In his college admissions essay, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that he first experienced a discrimination-free life while he picked tobacco in a Connecticut field. This is how the story gets told in a car wash.
I took my wife Sandy’s car to the car wash recently. A couple, husband and wife, run the business, which is always busy whenever I drive by. In the waiting room, you pay the wife, who is not afraid to express her opinions.
“Do you know why people don’t like Trump? Because he is an alpha male." She’s African-American, so that was a little surprising to me. She continued, “ Just like my husband.”
She pointed outside toward the tall, good looking Black man who oversees the operation and always wears cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, with the brim shaped just right—turned up in the back and curved down sharply in front, covering his forehead. On my first visit to their car wash, I had not been sure which of the differently priced car wash options I wanted, and, being an alpha male, he told me what I wanted: the $40.00 wash. He was right. They do a good job, and it’s worth the $40. But not to Sandy. She won’t patronize a business owned by a Trumper. I thought that only makes the battle lines even more entrenched. I didn’t know what I hoped would come of it, but I decided that was a reason why I would continue to take my car there. A few days before leaving on a Thanksgiving trip, she decided it would be all right if I took her car there.
As I sat in the waiting room, the wife started telling me and another customer how bad things are nowadays, how nobody in the government cares about the people any more, and how the only thing to do is pray.
“Do you pray?” she asked the other customer.
“Amen. Yes I do,” he said.
“Do you pray through Jesus Christ?”
“Yes, I do. Praise be.”
Then she turned to me. “Do you pray?”
“Yes.”
“In Jesus Christ?”
“Yes.” I was thinking that what Jesus Christ means to me was probably very different from what he means to her, but I didn’t want to get into that then. Not with her. On a previous visit, she had said that the United States is the best country in the world, that black people are better off here than anywhere, and that even when they were slaves, they were better off here than they were in Africa.
Turning to the topic of COVID, she said a lot of people from the Centers for Disease Control bring their cars there and, when it comes to COVID, they don’t know what they are talking about. I decided to try a little humor: “Do they roll their eyes and wonder what they are going to do with you?”
“Martin Luther King picked tobacco there, too."
"Really?"
"Yes, and that's where he found his calling. King said the people were so friendly, just treated him like everybody else."
“No. They go out there, roll their eyes at him and ask what he is going to do with me.” I was glad to see she had a sense of humor.
As they talked about the condition of the world, the other customer said he had grown up under segregation in Toccoa, Georgia. He graduated from Tuskegee Institute, in 1965, three years before I graduated from college. He had cleaned patients’ rooms at the hospital in Tuskegee where, to study syphilis, 400 black men, without their knowledge, had been intentionally infected with that disease from 1932 to 1972. The CDC had participated in the study.
“I even knew the doctor who ran the study. I’d say hello to him. He was always very friendly. Back then, you just didn’t know.” He also said Martin Luther King had spoken at his graduation and walked right in front of him.
“He was not tall, you know. He was only about five-seven. Coretta was taller than he was.” The name of Malcolm X then came up, and I said, “I never heard Martin Luther King speak, but I did hear Malcolm X speak.”
His question came immediately: “Where did you hear him speak?”
“In Connecticut.”
“Connecticut!” That clearly caught his attention.
“Yes, I grew up there.”
“I picked tobacco in Connecticut! In Enfield. And some other town there. What was the name of that town…? Not Enfield….” I knew from growing up in Connecticut that tobacco was and still is grown in that part of the state, but I wondered how this man had gotten from north Georgia to Connecticut to pick tobacco. He got back to Malcolm X.
“He was light-skinned, you know. He was only a little darker than you are.”
“He was tall and very slender,” I said. “And he wore a very trim suit.”
“And he had that wiry, reddish hair,” he replied. We talked about Malcolm X’s assassination and a newspaper photo we had both seen of the men who shot him, walking toward him with guns. My friend — I had just met this man, but by now he felt like a friend — asked,
“What’s your name?”
“Paul.”
“I’m Marvin.” Marvin said that many Black college students from the south went to Connecticut in the summer to work the tobacco crop. He still could not recall the name of the town where they stayed, but he remembered how friendly the people were. Then he added, “Martin Luther King picked tobacco there, too.” From reading about King and from living in Atlanta for many years, I knew a good bit about Martin Luther King’s life, including his growing up, and I had never encountered that piece of information. If I had, being from Connecticut, I would have remembered it, but I didn’t see any point in challenging Marvin’s story.
“Really?”
“Yes. And that’s where he found his calling.” This, now, seemed highly unlikely, but I continued to go along with him.
“Really?”
“Yes! King said the people were so friendly, just treated him like everybody else. There was a church we went to in that town… Simsbury! That’s what it was. I remember a choir of black students singing to the all-white congregation there. Simsbury. That’s it.” Then he added, “That’s where I found my calling, too.” I thought I might as well see where this would go.
“What was your calling?”
“Urban planning. I became an urban planner. I decided I wanted to improve communities.” Marvin had gotten his degree in urban planning from the University of Washington, returned to Georgia, and worked for the city of Atlanta. By that time, I would have been living in Atlanta, and I knew some people in urban planning.
“Did you know Leon Eplan?” Leon was the city's director of budget and planning in teh 1970s, when Maynard Jackson was mayor.
“I was Leon Eplan’s assistant! He died, you know.” I did know, and we both said what a nice man Leon had been. Marvin said he had also worked for Atlanta's rapid transit system, MARTA, and this led to me telling him that in the 1970s I had been on the staff of the church across the street from the North Avenue MARTA station when it was under construction.
Marvin said, “I went to meetings in that church!” While the North Avenue station was being built, representatives from MARTA regularly met with people who had an interest in the area around the future station, and I had convened those meetings.
“I chaired the Citizens’ Advisory Committee for the North Avenue station,” I said. I think we went to the same meetings!”
Marvin had brought his daughter’s car in because the plastic headlight covers had become oxidized and cloudy. He took me outside with him where the tall, good looking man in cowboy boots and hat had carefully taped off around the headlight covers and was sanding them with a very fine abrasive. He had finished one cover, and it looked as good as new. We complimented him on his work.
“It’s a skill I learned. I worked in ship building, too. I’ve picked up several skills. If you have a skill, you always have something to fall back on.”
I went back inside to pay, and on the way out Marvin was engrossed in conversation with a newly arrived customer. I looked at the new customer, smiled, and said, “He’ll keep you engaged for a while!”
“He’s military!” Marvin’s excitement told me that he was also a veteran.
I went home and told my wife all about my visit to the car wash. My story seemed to outweigh her reservations about spending our money there. This was a Thursday, and that afternoon I decided to take a final look at the A section of the previous Sunday’s New York Times. On page 17 I saw a small headline: “Saving a Connecticut Farm That Stirred the Dream.” For many summers, Black students from traditionally Black colleges in the south had in fact gone to Connecticut to work on tobacco farms. Developers had planned to build 300 homes on a tract of land that had been one of those farms but had recently agreed to sell it to the town of Simsbury. It will become an historic site. And, before he entered Morehouse College as a 15-year-old, Martin Luther King had in fact been one of those students. He took a train north and in a letter told his parents that after Washington, D.C., there was no discrimination: He could go wherever he wanted. Three years later, he again spent the summer picking tobacco in Connecticut and discovered that he could even eat in one of the best restaurants in Hartford. A few more years later, he wrote in his application to seminary that what he experienced during this second summer had led him to his life calling.
I wanted to show the article to Marvin and imagined he might even want to visit the former tobacco farm. He had said that his children are surprised when he tells them what things were like for him when he was growing up. I imagined him taking his children there. I called a friend who had worked for the City of Atlanta when Marvin had, but she had no memory of an urban planner whose first name was Marvin. I will keep trying to find him.
An Episcopal priest and psychotherapist, Paul Thim worked before his retirement for 20 years in the field of substance abuse treatment. He and his wife live in Dekalb County, Georgia.