“Race Riot” Ushered In New Era

Around 11:40 a.m. on Jan. 27, 1969, Barbara Kegeles (then Cohen) was sitting in the Hamden High School cafeteria eating lunch when she felt a rumble. ​“I looked up and I saw a plate of spaghetti fly by me.”

Curtis Adams was eating lunch in the cafeteria, too. (The menu item was actually ravioli.) He was cooling down from an altercation that had occurred earlier that morning between black and white students.

Suddenly, a group of white students stormed in. Fists and ravioli started flying, and chairs crashed into the ground. Then came an explosion.

Kegeles, like most of the students in the cafeteria, got up and ran out. She was one of the only students who had a car; her friends begged her to take them with her to get away from the school. She remembered 15 – 18 kids packed into her Mustang as she drove away from the building.

Racial tensions were high in schools across the country. Fights were breaking out in cities, but nothing major had happened yet in Hamden. Most of its residents still thought it was a sleepy suburb of New Haven.

For many, that Monday shattered that sense of tranquility.

Within hours, the news spread around the region: Hamden had just had a race riot.

Or had it?

And how much has changed a half-century later?

Collective memory, for starters.

Friday At The ​“Zoo”

In 1969, Hamden was still a mostly white town. When Curtis Adams had moved into the Pine Rock neighborhood two years earlier, his was the first black family on the block. Soon, all but three neighbors had put up for sale signs. Two years after he left home for the Air Force, someone left a burning cross in his parents’ front yard.

Hamden High had 2,100 students in 1969; 91 were black.

Tensions between black and white students that school year had begun with an impromptu football game at Pine Rock Field in September. One team, of which Adams was a part, was mostly black. The other was composed entirely of white Hamden students, most of them members of an Italian-American fraternity called the ​“Deltas.” A fight broke out between the two sides, and police arrested three of the white players.

Though one side was white and the other black, Adams said the fight was not really about race. It was a fight between two sides in a football game. Still, it sparked tensions that would continue to simmer, and finally explode on the Monday morning in January that became Hamden’s first race riot.

The infamous Monday morning cafeteria fight had a more immediate cause as well. It was the sequel to a fight that had broken out that morning in the lobby which, according to many reports, was a carryover from a fight at a dance the previous Friday evening.

“It was another Friday night at the oft-tempetuous ​‘Zoo,’ the Parks-Recreation Department’s turbulent teen canteen at the high school cafeteria,” the Hamden Chronicle reported. ​“A non-student arrived, surveyed the scene, and made the rounds. One-by-one, on an obvious selective basis, he singled out first one boy, then another, then another — and moved in to shake hands. An encouraging sign that trouble would absent itself from the ​‘Zoo’ this Friday night? On the contrary! It was rather an ominous ​‘fingering’ by the visitor of the boys to be ​‘hit’ before the night was up.”

The students took the fight outside. Eight of them — four white and four black — ended the evening with a visit to the police department, though they were not arrested.

The Chronicle’s account suggested that some boys just wanted to pick a fight. Other reports stated that the source of conflict was comments that some white boys had made to black girls. 

Over the weekend, the tensions stewed. Around 8:15 a.m. Monday, groups of white and black students gathered in the school lobby. The white students, who were mostly in frats, took the south side of the room, the black students the north. Teachers gathered to try to stop whatever was brewing, with ​“all available male faculty members” forming a restraining line, according to Administrative Assistant, and later Principal, George Fitch.

The white boys quickly breached the line.

Police came and restored order, sending the black students to the auditorium and the white ones to the principal’s office. The principal ordered a lengthened homeroom period to calm the students down.

“And Now The High Schools”

At around 11 a.m., school administrators decided to resume classes, letting the black students out of the auditorium where they had been held. At 11:40, many of them had gone to the cafeteria.

According to a subsequent report by the Hamden Community Relations Council, which the mayor convened to investigate the incident, a few cafeteria tables were usually occupied by the fraternities. Black students had sat down at adjacent tables, and some spilled over to the tables where the white fraternities usually sat.

The frat members were still in the principal’s office at that point. They heard that a group of black girls was sitting at the tables they usually occupied.

That, it seems, was too much for them. They left the principal’s office, picking up more students along the way, and ​“surged into the cafeteria towards the black students,” in Fitch’s words.

The Hamden Chronicle gave a colorful account of what happened next:

“Chairs flew. Trays of food flew. Girls began to scream. Punches were thrown. More chairs, more plates dotted the air. In a ramp nearby, someone discharged a cherry bomb. A frightened girl fainted. A teacher heard the detonation noise and ran to the hall. For a horrible instant, he thought the fallen girl had been shot.

“Patrolman Fred Morton dashed into the melee, slipped on a patch of food on the floor, and careened into a wall, sustaining a bad hip injury.”

Morton was the only person injured that day. Though you wouldn’t think it by the way it’s remembered: Hamden High’s race riot.

Boycott

The school ended up suspending 37 students: 27 white and 10 black. On the day of the event, police arrested seven students. A few days later, they arrested 20 more. Adams was among that 20. The charges against him were later dropped.

The administration decided to cancel school on Tuesday. Tuesday evening, 150 black parents met at the Christian Tabernacle Baptist Church on Newhall Street in southern Hamden and decided to boycott Hamden High out of concern for their children’s safety. On Wednesday, 500 students were absent, twice the normal absenteeism rate. Fewer than 10 of the 91 black students showed up.

The Council of Black Fathers met with school officials. They were afraid of the fraternities and, according to the Community Relations Committee report, ​“were chagrined that the school system had not taken action against” them. They also protested the suspensions of black students, as did the ACLU.

The following Monday, the Black Educators Organizations of Greater New Haven, the Black Student Alliance at Yale, and other groups set up an impromptu school for the black students at the Lincoln School on Shelton Avenue in New Haven. On Wednesday, the Council of Black Fathers called off the boycott.

Most of those involved were seniors who graduated a few months later. Rochelle Bradley, one of those graduating seniors, said that after she and other black students returned to school, things resumed as they had been before. ​“We let off some steam,” she said.

That spring, Bradley and the rest of her class graduated. If the fight did bring changes to the school, they were not around for very long to witness them.

From Food Fight To ​“Riot”

This month, members of the Class of 1969 returned to Hamden High for their 50th reunion. On the morning of May 4, members of the class of 1969 wandered through the halls of their old high school. Some found the building almost unrecognizable after multiple renovations and additions and the ravages of a half-century of memory.

As they stood in the new cafeteria, looking around at the bare white walls, one alum called out in jest:

“Riot in ten minutes!”

Bill Jackson was one of the alumni who stood peering around the new cafeteria. Fifty years ago, when he stood on a table eating the ice cream cone he got from the cafeteria every day as plates of ravioli flew by him and chairs crashed into the floor, the word ​“riot” had already been used, before the actual melee even began.

“I don’t think it was a race riot. I really don’t,” he said. All the other alums who spoke with the Independent agreed.

The cafeteria fight was first described as a riot an hour and 25 minutes before it happened. The word came straight from Mayor William Adams’ mouth. Adams (no relation of Curtis Adams) arrived from town hall at 10:15 a.m., according to the Hamden Chronicle, to respond to the morning’s confrontation.

“They’ll think a sure way to get any afternoon off is to start a riot,” the Chronicle quoted him saying.

In the moment, many students did not think it was a race riot, and 50 years later, they still don’t.

“When they allowed those frats to come into that cafeteria, it was about self-defense. I was fighting for my body,” said Curtis Adams. ​“It didn’t matter if you’re black, white, or indifferent. If you get attacked, you’re going to defend yourself … The politicians turned it into a race riot.”

For the press and the politicians, he said, the students became ​“pawns.”

“I think a lot of them just wanted to be politically active and correct. The papers, they just wanted to sell papers. It was a win for pretty much everybody except the kids,” he said.

A Career Is Launched

Many alumni suggested that the dramatic photographs (such as the one above) that student Richie Mei took during the fight may have helped the event gained national attention. The photos captured an image that was gripping the nation at the time.

Mei was among the students in the cafeteria when the melee erupted. An aspiring photographer, he took out his camera and started shooting. The pictures he took that day launched his career as a photojournalist. He went on to photograph for the Stamford Advocate and the Hartford Courant, but not before the ACLU got him back in school after Hamden High suspended him for skipping class to photograph his classmates in action. He died in 2001.

Mei’s photographs appeared later that day on front page of the New Haven Register, providing a striking image of what the story deemed a ​“racial battle.” The Hamden Chronicle published them later that week. The next month, his photos made it big when one appeared in the Feb. 7 issue of Time Magazine, which called the incident a ​“racial brawl.”

The Time article was about race-based violence in America’s schools. It had the title: ​“STUDENTS; And Now the High Schools.”

It began:

In Washington, D.C., an assistant high school principal tried to stop three teen-agers from robbing the school bank; they shot him dead. In New York City, a high school chemistry teacher stepped into the hall to investigate a disturbance: three youths squirted lighter fluid on his clothing and set him aflame. In San Francisco, helmeted police dispersed teen-agers from the grounds of Mission High School after violence had flared between black and Spanish-speaking students for six successive days. In Hamden, Conn., seven students were arrested for participating in a racial brawl in the high school cafeteria.

That was the only mention Hamden got in the article. Clearly, what happened at Hamden High was not nearly as severe as the other examples in the opening paragraph. Nonetheless, Mei’s photograph was the only one to accompany the story.

The New York Times also covered the event, though without a photo. ​“Forty [sic] students were suspended from Hamden High School today in the investigation of a racial brawl that broke out yesterday in the school cafeteria,” it reported.

Mei’s photographs ​“captured an image that was so popular at the time,” said Alum Jim Ortel, who showed up to a reunion dinner at Lenny and Joe’s Fish Fry on May 3. ​“It fit the narrative of the time,” he said, though the actual event was not really a race riot.

As Rochelle Bradley flipped through her yearbook at Lenny and Joe’s, she called the event a food fight in the cafeteria. Yet the time, she said, gave it another valence.

“It was something, you know, because it was during that time. Riots here, riots there,” she said.

According to the Community Relations Committee report, ​“the students almost unanimously, did not see it in strictly black and white terms.” It concluded that the source of much of the tension was frustrations among the fraternity members about their education, which they took out both on high achieving students of all races, who did not band together, and black students, who did.

The committee concluded that the word ​“confrontation” was the most accurate way of describing the event. ​“Without any question,” a footnote states, ​“because of a trend of violence in other suburban high schools this incident received national coverage in Time magazine, which may have taken it out of its proper perspective.”

Those who say the event was not a race riot said the fight still, without a doubt, had something to do with race.

“There was no black curriculum,” said Adams. ​“There was no black anything until we formed a black student union.”

Adams said that if you were not in a frat, it was tough to join the football team. Since there were no black students in frats, that meant no or almost no black football players.

Then, of course, there were the frats. Some members were fine, said Adams, but others were racist. And the racism among students didn’t end after 1969. In 1975, students got to school to find black effigies hanging from the cafeteria ceiling.

To call the 1969 event race riot, however, ascribes intentions to the black students that many say they did not have.

“It became a racial thing,” said Adams. ​“I think that ticked off a lot of black students because the finger was pointed at us.”

Most people in Hamden don’t actually remember the event, and most know very little about it. All most have heard is that a ​“race riot” happened in Hamden in 1969.

The terms ​“race riot,” as well as ​“racial battle,” ​“racial brawl,” and ​“racial fracas,” in the context of American collective memory, suggest that the source of the conflict was black students who aired their grievances through violence. No matter how favorably history may look upon the cause of 1960s rioters, when the term riot is applied to Hamden High, it turns the black students who dropped their plates of ravioli in the cafeteria into rioters. Hence, the use of the term ​“militant” applied to the black students in a Hamden Chronicle Op-Ed.

A ​“Black” & ​“White” Hamden?

A nation that can send men to walk on the surface of the moon can, must and will solve its racial problems. WE CANNOT HAVE A BLACK AMERICA AND A WHITE AMERICA. WE CANNOT HAVE A BLACK HAMDEN AND A WHITE HAMDEN.

We, therefore, must conclude that the final answer to most racial problems, and certainly the final answer to Hamden’s problems must be a general distribution of blacks and whites in all neighborhoods and in all sections, so that all live in a truly integrated Hamden. 

In August 1969, the Community Relations Committee delivered its report on the high school incident with those concluding words. They were hopeful words in 1969. In 2019, perhaps they sound too hopeful.

After the melee, politicians and some white students attended meetings with black students and parents, including the Council of Black Fathers. Frank Lucibello, who was president of the student council at the time, recalled attending one of those meetings at a church in southern Hamden.

The intention was to heal, and to address the problems that black students faced. The alumni the Independent interviewed said it didn’t work.

“What I hoped at the time that it sparked was attention to the existing problem,” said Adams. ​“I don’t think they’ve ever addressed it.”

“They listened to our grief,” recalled Bradley. ​“That’s about it.”

Bradley and Adams said some positive changes did occur. After the fight, students formed ​“The Group,” which aimed to discuss relations between black and white students. Students also formed a black student union.

However, the official response, Adams said, only paid lip service to the grievances of black students.

The Community Relations Committee was composed of five members. One was black. 

Its report summarized the committee’s recommendations in 15 points. Of those, two suggested responses to the needs of black students: create ​“black studies” course offerings, and recruit more black teachers. The rest aimed to prevent future confrontations with physical and administrative changes to the school. Four of the recommendations specifically addressed the needs of the fraternity students, which the report described as mostly non-college bound: more vocational training, guidance, and course offerings for non-college bound students, and alternative activities for fraternity members that would pull them away from the frats.

Not So Easy

Tensions didn’t end with the 1969 ​“riot.”

On June 2, 1975, another fight broke out in the Hamden High cafeteria. This time, according to the Bridgeport Telegram, 25 people were injured.

This incident did not get a mention in Time Magazine or in The New York Times. A fight in Hamden High was no longer national news.

It was around that time, recalled Class of 1976 grad Michelle Turner, that students walked into the school to find black effigies hanging from the cafeteria ceiling.

Today, Adams said, the town has changed in many ways. Fifty years ago, he would never have seen another black person at the places in town where he likes to fish. Now, he does. Fifty years ago, few black students could join the Hamden High football or basketball team. When he last saw the school’s basketball team, he said he was shocked by how many black players there were.

Hamden’s population has grown much more diverse.

In 1969, 91 of 2,100 Hamden High students were black. In 2019, the Hamden School District is 62 percent students of color. 30 percent are black.

Nonetheless, Adams said, ​“things never really did get any better.”

Adams said he thought the town had finally made a leap when it elected Scott Jackson as its first black mayor in 2009. However, he said, Hamden is still segregated. Highwood, where Adams lives, and other parts of southern Hamden are predominately black and Latinx. Neighborhoods like Spring Glen and West Woods remain mostly white. South Hamden’s Church Street School is 12 percent white. The Spring Glen School is 67 percent white.

Some white members of the class of 1969, too, said they have seen little change.

“The root causes still exist today,” said Wayne Gilbert as he caught up with his classmates at the Glenwood Drive-in on May 3. ​“Nothing’s changed.”

Stu Cohen echoed Gilbert: ​“We still have the same problems. They’re never gonna go away.”

Now a school with 62 percent students of color, Hamden High has come a long way in the 50 years since the riot broke out in 1969. The Hamden School District is working on a number of programs to actively recruit minority teachers and improve the diversity of its curriculum. Teachers, too, have taken initiative to get a greater diversity of authors and characters in their classrooms, including one at Ridge Hill who has launched a fundraising effort to do so. In February, a teacher and a student at the middle school took the lead to celebrate Black History Month.

Yet many community members say the district still has work to do.

In January, a panel met to discuss how to bring a more diverse curriculum and more diverse authors to Hamden’s schools. In April, students and parents came to the Board of Education to ask the administration to start making its faculty and curriculum better reflect its student body.

Black Hamden High students who spoke with the Independent shared experiences of racial insensitivity by both teachers and fellow students. They said students of color are still tracked into lower-level classes more often than their white peers. Many teachers, they said, make insensitive comments or don’t give black history any of the attention it deserves.

The Hamden High administration did not respond to a request for comment on this article.

In 2019, perhaps it’s an exaggeration to say that there is a ​“black Hamden and a white Hamden.” Perhaps it’s not. For sale signs no longer pop up in white neighborhoods when black families move in. The divisions are not as stark as they were in 1969.

Yet the conversations continue. And none will disagree: divisions remain. Walk East on Morse Street and you will notice that it looks very different as soon as you get to Prospect. 

After 21 years in the Air Force and 23 years at Stop & Shop, Adams has retired. As he sat at his kitchen table on Morse one recent Monday afternoon, he looked back at 50 years of radical change that have brought him to a neighborhood that in many ways does not look that different than it did 50 years ago.

“Everything has got to take baby steps,” said Adams. ​“But I’m 68 years old, and I’m sick of baby steps.”