By Stacey Close

 

In 1971, Benjamin Foster Jr. received his undergraduate degree in sociology from Trinity College in Hartford. Though African American students had attended Trinity, Connecticut’s second oldest institution of higher education, before the 1960s, the college had recently committed to increasing the number admitted to campus. Foster became one of those students accepted to a college built on a “foundation of inclusion and freedom of thought and expression” (Trinity College website). Foster’s matriculation put him on a road less traveled, from the segregated South to the North End of Hartford to an elite, private college. From this path, he became an influential voice for quality education for young African Americans, a shaper of public policy, and a builder of bridges to the larger community. Along the way, he sought to share and inspire others with the power of his words.

 

Segregated North Carolina: Community and Culture

Foster recalled his childhood during a March 2023 interview with the author. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1946, he resided with his family in a segregated community close to two renowned historically Black institutions, Saint Augustine’s College and Shaw University. He grew also to appreciate the influence of African American culture, which he carried throughout his life. Shaw was famous for being the birthplace of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the most influential civil rights organizations of the 1960s. While Foster attended Lucille Hunter School, a historically Black elementary school for academically gifted students, he saw African American professionals, tradespeople, and laborers who served as role models for local children. He later studied at Marine Corps Base

Camp Lejeune, where the children of military personnel

attended integrated schools. Foster also enjoyed selling and delivering copies of The Carolinian, the local African American newspaper. His grandmother told him about her grandmother and shared his family’s history, which included that of the Native and African American sides of the family. While the community that nurtured and influenced Foster proved tight-knit and strong, he received the opportunity to visit Hartford every other year with an aunt who lived in the city (Liz Halloran, “Taking Up a Bloomfield Challenge,” The Hartford Courant, September 24, 1994).

 

The North End

At 13, Foster moved with his family to Hartford, where they first lived in the Bellevue

Square housing project (Halloran). Foster recalled that one of the highlights of his time there came in 1963 after Wade Timmons, a friend from the North End and standout athlete, suggested they attend a bazaar at Footguard Hall. Also attending was Cassius Clay, soon to be known as Muhammad Ali. To Foster’s shock, Timmons approached Clay and began talking “smack.” That same year, Foster and friends had watched by the local store next to Hartford’s Union Baptist Church as Rev. Richard Battles, pastor of Mount Olive Baptist Church, walked up with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A short conversation followed about staying in school and out of trouble.

Foster spent his high school years at Hartford Public High School. Dr. John J. LeConche, a former educator, recalled of him that “he had a goal to be somebody, although he wasn’t sure what” (Halloran). While Foster attended classes at Hartford Public High School, he worked at G. Fox to help keep his family afloat. He also served as a role model and protector for his younger siblings. Upon graduating in 1964, Foster followed several African American men in the community and found employment as a general laborer at Pratt and Whitney. After a year at Pratt, he received his draft notice from the military.

Upon completing his Army service, Foster returned to Pratt and Whitney. He soon decided to take courses at Manchester Community College and worked for Al Ford at the Ford–James Pharmacy, Hartford’s only African American–owned pharmacy. Nancy Wogan, one of his professors at Manchester Community College, recommended him for an interview at Trinity, a place she deemed more challenging for him. On the day of the interview, Foster dressed in a business suit and made the crosstown jaunt to Trinity. When he returned home, his mother proudly informed him that he had a message from Trinity that he had been accepted as a student.

 

Trinity College

For Foster, Trinity College opened a door to the academy that allowed for a challenging exchange of ideas and ignited his growing yearning for knowledge. One of his professors was Chuck Stone, a native of Hartford. Stone, a visiting professor, taught the intricacies of national politics, a subject he learned by working for Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the nation’s most powerful African American politician of the 1960s. Stone also knew Hartford and the struggles of urban America well, which allowed him to connect with Foster.

Trinity offered Foster classroom hours that proved important in his academic growth and opportunities to develop leadership skills and friendships within and outside student organizations. He became the president of the Coalition of Black Students; in addition, he built a lifelong friendship with Kevin Sullivan, another Trinity student and later stalwart in the Connecticut legislature. On May 15, 1970, The Hartford Courant announced that Foster received the Samuel S. Fishzohn Award for Community Service. The following year, Foster was given the Trinity College Human Relations Award (“16 Trinity Students Win Awards,” The Hartford Courant, May 14, 1971).

While African American professors stimulated the growing scholar’s quest for knowledge, professors such as Dr. H. McKim Steele, a white professor interested in African and African American culture and history, introduced Foster and other students to research on the Dahomey, Cheikh Anta Diop, and African equestrians. In our interview, Foster recalled that he took three courses with Steele, a graduate of Princeton University and Johns Hopkins, who introduced him to the works of Frantz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth, and Léopold Senghor’s works on negritude. Because of Steele, Foster met dignitaries like diplomat and professor Will Mercer Cook and Dr. Charles Hamilton, who wrote Black Power: The Politics of Liberation with Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael).

As Foster flourished at Trinity, its magnificent library became his laboratory for further inquiry and research. The 50th reunion yearbook for the class of 1971 highlights key moments of his early and professional achievements and shows how he remained connected to the college after graduation through his work as a member of the board of trustees and frequent attendance at its major functions.

 

Professional Life

Before entering Trinity College, Foster recalled, he had inquired about work at the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities (CHRO) on the recommendation of State Senator Wilber Smith, an African American politician from the North End. There, he met Arthur Green, the director, who hired him as a community resource person. After completing his time at the CHRO, Foster took a position with Hartford Parks and Recreation. During this time, a trip to Julia Pounds’s Variety, a North End store, further ignited his quest for knowledge. Mrs. Pounds’s inventory included African American newspapers and the book 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof by Joel Augustus Rogers, which she had purchased in a Harlem bookstore he later visited.

Always a student, outside and inside the classroom, Foster completed a master of arts in teaching history at Wesleyan University in Middletown in 1973. Foster’s first time in the classroom came as a teacher at Hillhouse High School in New Haven, where he immersed his students in his weekly lesson plans to bring history alive. He also taught at Manchester Community College, where he introduced students in the 1970s to African history. While his time at Wesleyan prepared him to excel as a classroom educator, it also developed his administrative and scholarly potential.

 

Cambridge, Scholarship, and UMass Amherst

As Foster navigated the education profession, he impressed people like Howard Klebanoff, a noted local attorney and politician, and his wife Sandra, a Hartford Board of Education member, with his compelling interest in alternative education. As a result, Klebanoff recommended him to Luther Seabrook at the Center for the Study of Public Policy (CSPP) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a potential fellowship. A week later, Foster was granted an opportunity to work on a project at the CSPP at Harvard University, also known as the “Harvard plan” or “regulated education voucher plan,” the forerunner of today’s magnet, choice, and charter schools.

Working as a consultant at the CSPP in 1973, Foster published “The Case for Vouchers” in The Black Scholar (4, no. 8–9 (May–June 1973)). He relayed the growing concern of parents, both Black and white, about public school education and inequities. Though the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Education Association had concerns about vouchers further entrenching segregation, Foster argued that vouchers correctly applied offered an opportunity for poor and middle-class children to receive an education equivalent to that of wealthy children. Foster argued: “Clearly, blacks must begin seeking alternative ways of financing their schools,” given that the main sources for financing schools are property taxes and absentee landlords in urban America, where most African Americans resided, often had “no vested interest in the welfare of public schools.” The movement for charter schools had its roots in the argument around vouchers and quality education. When Rochester, New York, developed a “Feasibility Study for the Design and Implementation of an Education Voucher System,” they sought Foster as a consultant.

Though he considered staying in Cambridge, Foster eventually sought and earned a master’s and doctorate in education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. While his arguments in The Black Scholar did not go unnoticed, in 1985, he published “No Place for the Homeless” in Focus. In 1990, he contributed the book Looking for Payoff: A New Schooling for African-American Inner-City Youth to the research on African Americans and quality public education.

 

Leadership in Connecticut Public Schools

In 1994, after serving as the assistant director at A. I. Prince Technical High School in Hartford for seven years, Foster accepted a position as the principal of Bloomfield High School. At Prince Tech, he conceived and implemented Multicultural Day, recognizing and celebrating the student body’s diversity. He built a relationship with Collin Bennett, a local Republican politician and one of the most renowned business leaders in the region’s West Indian community. Though successful at Prince Tech, Foster faced a weighty challenge in Bloomfield. Over the previous six years, the high school had experienced a revolving door to upper-level administration. The school struggled through discipline problems, sinking morale among staff, and lagging scores on the SAT. Given the situation, Foster decided to build an “atmosphere of collaboration.” In short, he wanted to unite students, parents, staff, and the community. While he believed that the school needed a focus on increased discipline to foster academic performance, he saw “hope in the curriculum. But maybe we need a new way of trying to get it over to the students” (Halloran).

Foster’s approach brought the gifts of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities and preeminent African American scholars to Bloomfield’s mostly African American student body and predominantly white teaching staff. The community heard and learned from some of the greatest minds in the country, including neuropsychologist Dr. Charlene Drew Jarvis; Dr. Ralston “Rex” Nettleford, scholar-activist and vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies; Bob Moses, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader and developer of the Algebra Project, an effort to increase African American achievement in the subject; and Dr. Abdulalim Shabazz of Clark Atlanta University, who had turned out a generation of African American mathematicians. He also brought Yelena Khanga, the Afro-Russian interpreter for Mikhail Gorbachev and author of Soul to Soul, to campus to increase the students’ cross-cultural awareness. Students grew to respect Foster’s work and knew that he genuinely cared for their growth. He supported forming student organizations like the Lemuel Haynes Gospel Choir and a Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. When he arrived at Bloomfield High School, fewer than 50 percent of the students were going to college; at his departure, the college attendance rate had risen to 85 percent.

Another milestone in Foster’s career came while serving as director of E. C. Goodwin Technical High School in New Britain, where he successfully assisted in lobbying the state legislature for $56 million to renovate the facility and update the technological equipment. On May 13, 2002, The Hartford Courant lauded his efforts in acquiring the funding to improve Goodwin Tech. Foster also established an advisory board to help uplift the school, thus building community support for his work and ideas. Later, he served as district coordinator of social studies and adult education for the Consolidated School District of New Britain, where he facilitated K–12 curriculum updates (Mary Ellen Fillo, “Alumnus Honored for Support of Technical Schools,” The Hartford Courant, May 13, 2002). Foster was as transformative in New Britain as in Bloomfield and at Prince Tech.

 

Legacy

On April 21, 2023, Dr. Benjamin Foster convened an economic empowerment conference sponsored by the Institute for Cross-Cultural Awareness and Transformative Education, which he founded to honor the work of Francisco “Frank” Borges and Sanford Cloud Jr. The two attorneys, business executives, and former state politicians served as leaders, role models, and voices for the betterment of the state and the Black community. The event also advocated including financial literacy in the high school curriculum.

In 2018, Dr. Foster began a conversation with Representative Bobby Gibson of the 15th District of the Connecticut House of Representatives and a group of educators in Bloomfield regarding teaching African American history in Connecticut schools. That conversation was the seed of Public Act No. 19-12, which Governor Ned Lamont signed into law and required all high schools in the state to offer courses on African American, Latino, and Puerto Rican history. With the tireless work of those who initiated the conversation in Bloomfield, supportive teachers, collegiate educators, parents, students, and State Representatives Gibson and Bobby Sanchez, State Senator Douglas McCrory, and Dr. James Thompson of the Bloomfield Public Schools, voices around the state united in support. In December 2020, the State Board of Education unanimously approved the curriculum under Public Act No. 19-12.

In 2021, Benjamin Foster Jr. answered the call to narrate an audio companion to Venture Smith’s Colonial Connecticut, lending his voice to a resource that continues to help students at various reading levels connect to a story that documents the life of an enterprising formerly enslaved man and his family. Once again, he educated through the power of words, and another generation of young people will better know where they and their ancestors fit in the formation of the United States. During Foster’s own formative years, family members and educators inspired him with their own words and knowledge, setting him on a road less traveled from North Carolina to the North End to Trinity College and beyond to be a powerful voice for quality education. He has created a legacy by understanding history, public policy, and urban life and building lasting alliances.

 

Stacey Close, PhD, is a professor of African American history at Eastern Connecticut State University.

 

Listen!

“Why Teaching African American History in Connecticut Matters,” Grating the Nutmeg, gratingthenutmeg.libsyn.com/89-why-teaching-african-american-history-in-connecticut-matters

Explore!

To view a RelationshipTree documenting how Dr. Ben Foster was connected to people, places, and events, click https://relationshiptree.org/graph/hermesk/dr_-ben-foster