Carceral Connecticut

Carceral Connecticut: Middletown Stories of Race and Redevelopment
AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES 316, Fall 2024
Instructor: Jesse Nasta
WESMAPS LINK 

In the 1970s, during nationwide “urban renewal” or Redevelopment, the city of Middletown demolished an entire African American neighborhood to make parking lots and Route 9 on-ramps. Called the South End, this neighborhood had been Middletown’s Black business and community center for decades.

Why did city officials see this neighborhood as disposable and its residents as displaceable? When, why, and how did this Black neighborhood form, and how did its residents experience, respond to, and navigate the displacement of urban renewal? What can this lost neighborhood–less than half a mile from Wesleyan University’s campus–teach us about the history of race, inequality, housing, carcerality, segregation, and Black community and community resilience and resistance in the 20th century, and what lessons can this history teach us today?

In this Community-Engaged Learning course, students not only read assigned primary and secondary sources. They also conducted their own archival research and interviewed former South End residents to record, preserve, and share the largely undocumented history of this neighborhood and its legacies.

Although this course was entitled Carceral Connecticut and was one of the courses associated with the Carceral Connecticut Project (carceralconnecticut.com), of which Prof. Nasta was one of four Wesleyan faculty investigators, we did not focus primarily on prisons or incarceration. Rather, we explored carcerality as a broader set of practices and policies that have structured the world–including 20th-century Middletown–in ways that reinforce racism and racial inequality, including policing, segregation, and displacement. At the same time, we paid equal attention to how Middletown’s Black community has created institutions and neighborhoods that have resisted and responded to displacement, containment, and other carceral practices.