Love Letters Unlock History Of Community

When New Haven-based author Jill Marie Snyder found the letters detailing the romance between her parents when they were young, it was the beginning of a journey that led her to learn more about not only her own family, but the history of the Black community in New Haven, and how both contended with the racism they faced in their lives.

On Wednesday evening, Snyder gave audience members a taste of both in discussing her 2017 book Dear Mary, Dear Luther, in an online event hosted by the New Haven Museum.

Snyder’s mother, Mary Brooks, was born in Scranton, Penn. and grew up in neighboring Wilkes-Barre. Mary’s father, Clarence — a musician and a barber — and mother, Stella, had both grown up in a small town called Catawissa. They eloped in 1917. Clarence was Black (his father had escaped slavery in Virginia) and Stella was White, which some in Catawissa, including some in Stella’s family, could not abide. ​“Her brothers never spoke to her again,” Snyder said. ​“Sometimes there were people marching in front of their house.” They found burning crosses on their lawn. ​“Eventually they burned down the barbershop,” Snyder said, and Clarence and Stella left to start their family in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre instead.

Snyder’s father, Luther Snyder, was born in Wilkes-Barre. His family two generations before had lived in a Black enclave and stop on the Underground Railroad in what is now Pottsville, Penn. His grandfather had been a well-regarded chef who spoke multiple languages. Mary and Luther met when they were paired in a wedding procession in 1935. ​“Luther was smitten,” Snyder said. Mary was a few years younger than he was, and still only 15. Luther discovered that Mary and one of his aunts were neighbors. ​“He would visit his aunt and spent hours on the front porch swing with Mary,” Snyder said.

In 1937, when Mary graduated high school, Luther left to take a summer job in Asbury Park, N.J. That’s when the letters began.

It was Luther’s ​“first time at a beach resort, and he was just loving it,” Snyder said. Mary must have written him first, because Luther wrote back that ​“it was really swell to receive a letter from you — I only read it 17 times since I received it.” He went on to describe people wearing sunglasses strolling the boardwalk, the waves rolling in and out, and the fashionable people at the resort. ​“You should see the darn fool fang dangles they wear, such as hats with no tops and just the sole of the shoe, but that is the style,” he wrote.

When summer ended, Luther moved to New York City, where he dove into Harlem’s nightlife. Mary visited him there and professed she was jealous in a letter to him later. Luther reassured her that she was his favorite girl. ​“He’s being kind of cute. I think he’s learned to be a playboy,” Snyder said of that letter. But on New Year’s Day of 1939, having just come in from partying all night, Luther wrote Mary a letter that explained just how he felt. ​“Every day is a holiday since I met you,” he wrote. ​“Yes indeed, Mary, you really do things to me.”

They started talking about marriage in 1940 and got married in Harlem in January 1941. A relation of Mary’s told her that there were factory jobs at Winchester Repeating Arms in New Haven that Luther could get, so they moved to the Elm City. And Luther went to work at Winchester.

“New Haven in the 1940s was a boom town during World War II,” Snyder said. Mary and Luther arrived to find an already well-established Black community. The first Black people in New Haven arrived as slaves; slavery was practiced in Connecticut until 1848. Free Black people faced harsh discrimination. Housing restrictions meant they could only live in Fair Haven (then called New Liberia), the Hill, and the area between Goffe Street and Dixwell Avenue then called Poverty Square — establishing housing patterns that turned out to be remarkably persistent.

But the community saw successes, too. Three churches — Varick AME, Dixwell Avenue Congregational UCC, and St. Luke’s — were established by 1850. The community also had a ​“network of strivers,” as Snyder described them. Among them were Civil War hero Peter Vogelsang, entrepreneur William Lanson, teacher and later ambassador to Haiti Ebenezer Bassett, and Sarah Boone, who Snyder said may be the first woman of African ancestry to receive a patent, for a type of ironing board.

Snyder’s brother Roy was born in 1941. Segregation in the hospital meant that Mary didn’t have a bed in the hospital, and slept on a cot in the hallway. Jill and Jill’s brother Dale followed. The family, Snyder said, ​“called me Rascal. I don’t know why I had that nickname.” She recalled ​“family picnics at my aunt’s house in West Haven, going to the beach together — we were a tight-knit family growing up.”

Thanks to the work of local civil rights leaders, there were more opportunities for Black people in New Haven starting in the 1960s. All of the Snyders worked for Yale at some point. Luther worked with the campus’s mail. ​“I like to say that my mom went from being a homemaker to a nuclear physicist,” Snyder said, because Mary became a research assistant in the Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory. Roy became a human resources manager. Dale worked for campus police for 26 years. And Jill became a research assistant at the School of Epidemiology and Public Health. The last photograph of the Snyder family was taken in 1969. In 1973, Luther died of cancer.

Writing about her parents for Dear Mary, Dear Luther, Snyder said, ​“really forced me to think about each of them and their impact on my life. I started to think of them more wholly.” She encouraged others to try to do the same kind of genealogical research she did. ​“One reason I feel its importance is because reverence for ancestors is an important part of African culture,“ she said. ​“I found a deep sense of joy and gratitude for all my ancestors did for me … for what they did in their lives to make our lives better.”

For Snyder, doing the research also brought into sharper focus the ways both overt and institutional racism shaped the lives of her family members for as long as they lived. Mary, she recalled, had wanted to be an artist. ​“After she retired, she took up the hobby of painting. After a lifetime of raising children she fulfilled her dream,” Snyder said. Her father’s ​“disappointment was that he couldn’t go to college, though he never said it outright.” He instead pushed his children to do that for themselves. ​“His mantra for me was ​‘go to college, go to college,’” Snyder said.

“They were capable of so much more than they had the opportunity to do,” Snyder said of her parents. ​“My father still knew his high school French and his algebra” when Snyder was a student herself. ​“I realized he was probably on the college prep track in high school, but given the economics and limited opportunities that the men in his family had, he was not able to go.”

In response to a question from the audience, Snyder also recounted her own experiences with racism. In the late 1950s, when she was six, a White friend invited her over to play. When Snyder arrived at the house, however, the friend’s mother said, ​“You can’t come in here,” Snyder recalled, and ​“slammed the door in my face.”

“Jill, you’re going to meet a lot of people in your life, and some of the people won’t like you,” her mother explained to her. Sometimes that could be for legitimate reasons; maybe personalities clashed. But ​“some won’t like you because you’re a little colored girl,” Mary said.

More recently, Snyder said, she was driving in Vermont when a state trooper pulled her over. ​“He just came over to and asked me one question: ​‘Are you an American?’” Snyder seethed. ​“My family’s been here since the 1600s,” Snyder said. ​“My family’s been here 400 years. This person had the right to ask me if I’m an American because I’m brown.”

But by then, Snyder was no stranger to racism and its effects. ​“As a child, you have that moment that you realize being Black, you’re going to stand out, and some people are not going to like you,” she said. In response, she said, ​“in my family, the mantra was, ​‘you just have to work twice as hard to get half as far.’”

Dear Mary, Dear Luther is available through Author House and other online booksellers.