Plaza Honors City’s Black ​“King”

Bikers riding the Farmington Canal Trail slowed Saturday morning to watch as the city dedicated a planned plaza to William Lanson, an 19th Century black leader once disparagingly called the ​“King of the colored race” of New Haven.

Gathered adjacent to the future site of the plaza at the intersection of Canal and Lock streets, leaders from the city, state and community organizations shared their take on a long-forgotten figure crucial to New Haven’s early construction. City planners revealed an early model of the plaza. They said they hope to have a budget and solid installation plan in the next couple of months.

A runaway slave, Lanson became a successful self-taught engineer and entrepreneur. He developed key portions of New Haven. He built an extended harbor at Long Wharf using stone from East Rock, stimulating the city’s economy in the mid-19th Century. Lanson also served as superintendent of the Farmington Canal and founder of what is now Dixwell United Church of Christ.

Lanson went from owning just the clothes of his back to owning much of the neighborhood of Wooster Square. He hired black workers, paid them fair wages, and fought for their suffrage, earning him constant harassment from business leaders and policemen. By the time of his death in 1851, he had suffered major blows to his finances and reputation.

Despite his accomplishments, Lanson went virtually unrecognized for more than a century. The Amistad Committee commissioned Central Connecticut State University professor Katherine Dixon to write his biography, and copies were sold after the event Saturday. Amistad President Alfred Marder presented a brief overview of his significance to begin the event Saturday.

In 2011, the Connecticut Freedom Trail and Amistad Committee gave New Haven two plaques commemorating Lanson, one to be placed along the Long Wharf Pier and the other for the New Haven portion of the Farmington Canal, said Karyn Gilvarg, New Haven’s City Plan director.

Instead of just placing the plaques, the city decided to create an informative, in-depth ​“interpretive site,” Gilvarg (pictured) said.

Local leaders at the event said the lack of recognition of black, and other non-white, contributors to the city’s history is harmful to young people of color.

“I wonder if our young people would act the way they do — especially our young men, disproportionately African-American, who shoot — if they knew their legacy,” Mayor Toni Harp said.

“I graduated from schools here in New Haven, and I did not know this history. If we believed the history books, we would believe that everything was done by white, male Europeans,” said Board of Alders President Jorge Perez.

The plaza will be constructed at an intersection where many crucial community institutions converge, Yale President Peter Salovey said. Directly behind the Yale Health Center, Yale Police Department, and Dixwell-Yale Community Learning Center, the plaza also lies across the street from Grove Cemetery and across the trail from the site of Yale College’s future new residential colleges.

“In about three years, 800 students will live on the other side of the fence and will be inspired by the memorial,” Salovey said.

After the speeches, people headed over to read an annotated timeline of Lanson’s life on a scaled-down cardboard replica of a stone tablet. Funded by state grants, the plaza will also feature an early map of New Haven etched into the sidewalk and large monument of an open door titled ​“William Lanson Connected New Haven to the Farmington Canal.”

Corris Smith (pictured) said she didn’t know anyone who had heard of Lanson before the event. ​“Our children need to know our history,” she said. Smith’s mother is a member of the Amistad Committee.