The Connecticut Valley Tobacco Historical Society
Preserving the history of the people and techniques of growing andharvesting the crop that made the CT. River Valley.
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Brilliance in the ValleyThe Brilliance in the Valley High School Museum Curriculum encourages teen exploration and active preservation of a worthwhile agricultural, social, and economic history. By learning and applying historical practices, participants prevent the erasure of the history of African American students then enrolled in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the American South, who participated in northward seasonal labor migrations to earn money for higher education before, during, and after World War II.World War II era farm labor shortages and rampant racial brutalities normalized throughout southern states led to the seasonal migration of college students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Through this exhibit, you can experience first-hand how HBCU "migrant" labor has shaped the Tobacco Valley and its communities through interactive exhibits, educational programs, and events.  Above, 1940 HBCU Student Tobacco Worker Choral Group  PRE-TRIP Hope & the Beginnings of Southern Student Tobacco Labor Migration Background In 1916, John Hope, Morehouse College president, and civic leader, was tapped by the National Urban League to recruit college students to fulfill the farm labor needs of Connecticut's shade tobacco growers, whose "million-dollar crop" was jeopardized due to labor shortages caused by WWI. The Urban League and Hope recognized the unique opportunity afforded by a partnership with New England tobacco growers; the alignment would simultaneously provide employment opportunities by which "young people would have an opportunity to earn money for their education" and allow for seasonal departure away from the daily vigilante terror then rampant throughout the south. Amidst the jarring landscape of a brutally segregated Southern landscape, John Hope recruited 25 Morehouse students to participate in the social "experiment" knowingly referred to by a Connecticut journalist as "Labor on a Plantation to Earn an Education." In short order, other African-American Colleges and Universities, i.e., Howard University, Tuskegee Institute, and Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, followed Hope's lead and began recruiting students for participation in what would be a fifty-year-long relationship between Shade Tobacco growers in the Connecticut River Valley and Historically Black Colleges and Universities throughout the American South.
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