From Small Crawl to A Giant Step
by Michael Miranda Sawyer
Connecticut prides itself on being a land of liberty under the rule of law. Its founder, Thomas Hooker, created this reputation by implementing the Fundamental Orders, with the reverend’s most notable claim, “the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people.” Yet the colony’s actions and history show how Connecticut’s “steady habits” preserved hierarchies as much as they preserved liberty. The displacement of indigenous peoples, especially after the Pequot war of 1637, displayed signs of contradictions as freedom was also equated to conquest and erasure. After the slow process of gradual emancipation began in the late 1700s, full emancipation came in1848, making Connecticut the last New England state to abolish the practice of slavery. The disenfranchisement of Black men in the 1818 Connecticut Constitution and the enforcement of the Black laws of the 1830s further limited opportunities for people of color. These injustices set the stage for Louis S. Peterson.
Born on June 17, 1922, Peterson was brought up in Hartford’s South End. He attended Bulkeley High School and later attended Morehouse College, followed by Yale School of Drama and New York University. Peterson’s signature work Take a Giant Step (1953), a play that mirrored his life in Hartford, made history as the first play by a Black playwright to be produced on Broadway. Production started in Hartford and broadened out to Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre, where it opened on September 25, 1953. The Times hailed Louis’ play as one of the best of the season, featuring a 17-year-old Louis Gosset Jr. in the lead role. United Artists released a film version in 1959, with Peterson and Julius Epstein sharing screenwriting credits and the singer Johnny Nash (of “I Can See Clearly Now” fame) playing lead.
The Power of Place
At its core, Take a Giant Step is ultimately about the power of “place” — both geographically and socially. Peterson’s protagonist, Spencer Scott, is one of only four Black students at his high school, and his family is the only Black family in their neighborhood in the south end of a New England Town. Spence, at the start of the play, is suspended for challenging a White teacher’s racist remarks and none of his White peers come to his defense. We soon discover that this incident of racial isolation is just the tip of the iceberg for Spence.
Although Hartford is not specifically named, the parallels with Peterson’s life and clues within the play reveal that Hartford is indeed the setting. Echoing the aspirations of many Black southerners in the first and second Great Migrations (1920s – 1950s), the family’s maid Christine tells the reason she moved from Alabama to the North: “I wanted something better, I guess. I decided I was coming up north to try my luck” (Peterson, Act II, Scene ii, 73). Christine also echoes the experience of Black southerners seeking a better life in the north, yearning for a true sense of freedom only to find themselves living in a passive form of segregation.
In Hartford, these setbacks were cultivated by redlining maps in 1937 brought by the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which deemed the north end “hazardous” and ensured the south end was for White families. Historian Jack Dougherty, who wrote On The Line, a book on Hartford’s segregation, reminds us that “federal and local policies openly prohibited home mortgages and public housing for Blacks and legally protected white only property deeds” (McGann and Dougherty ).
We see this in Spence’s movements: as he’s suspended from school and fears confronting his parents, he runs away to the north end searching for connection and belonging in a Black bar. However, he is still alienated by his own people due to his more privileged upbringing. Hartford, the city founded by Thomas Hooker and his promise of unity to its citizens, becomes an antagonizing force to Spence; the south end stifles his voice for speaking up about the injustice he endured, and the north end leaves him wondering about his belonging and authenticity to his community, ushering in a sense of confusion and dismay. This alienation is the central tension of the play, and its roots are in Connecticut’s history of racial violence and discrimination.
Historical Contexts
White dominance was insinuated in a variety of ways in Connecticut’s history. The Black Laws of the 1830s were passed in response to Prudence Crandall’s school to educate Black Women in Canterbury. This pushed some of the White community to establish laws to prevent people of color from advancing in society, even if these students came from “higher” upbringings. Similarly, the election of Black Governors from the 1700s to the 1800s was portrayed as a sign of progress for the Black community, yet this title was ultimately used to mock the Black community and to surveil and control Black populations. And redlining plays a significant role not just in Spence’s story but also in Peterson’s. Evidence from Bulkley High School’s 1940 yearbook and the 1940 census reveals that there were only three Black students in Peterson’s graduating class and his family may have been the only Black family in south Hartford’s Ward 7.
The geography of Hartford is a major factor in the shaping of Spence’s worldview, and the influence of his parents is another. As products of their generation, Spence’s parents reluctantly accept their role in assimilating to the “land of steady habits” as a means to upward mobility. Lem, his father, talks about his strategy for working at the bank: “I hear those crumbs at the bank talk about niggers and making jokes about niggers every day – and I stay on – because I need the job – so that you can have the things you need” (Act II, Scene i, 59). Lem speaks about the racial remarks he has to endure day to day in his job, but he believes he has to endure them for the sake of his family; he would rather sacrifice his dignity because fighting back meant fighting against the status quo and potentially losing everything he worked so hard to achieve for his family – a middle class existence in a safe neighborhood.
Spence’s mother, May, is more explicit in her words:
You’re a little colored boy – that’s what you are – and you have no business talking back to white women, no matter what they say or what they do. If you were in the South, you could be lynched for that […] So from now on, my advice to you is to try and remember your place.” (Act II, Scene i, 59-60)
Their words capture the fear of parents who are sacrificing for their family to live a peaceful and prosperous life. However, they live in constant fear that any move that falls out of line would result in social ostracization. Which is why Spence’s predicament scares them so much. Spence’s refusal to toe the line, on the other hand, reflects the younger generation’s sense of rebellion and foreshadows the civil rights movement of the next decade.
Take a Giant Step’s Legacy
Take a Giant Step paved the way for many Black playwrights in postwar America. It revealed to Broadway audiences and, later, to moviegoers the interior life of a Black teenager enduring the hidden caste system of the North. Peterson wrote other plays, like Entertain a Ghost, which opened at New York’s Actor’s Playhouse in 1962. His work as a screenwriter in Hollywood was similarly groundbreaking: he earned an Emmy nomination for his screenwriting work in a television show called Joey for Goodyear Television Playhouse (1957), a first for a Black screenwriter. Later he settled into a life of teaching at State University of New York, Stony Brook.
Yet it is Take A Giant Step that stands as Louis S. Peterson’s enduring contribution to American literature. The play is more than a coming-of-age story – it is a Hartford story, a Connecticut story, and ultimately an American story, examining the factors that shape Black life in this country, and particularly in the North. Spence’s crawl through the contradictions of his world becomes, in Peterson’s hands, a giant step in uncovering the truth about race, place, and belonging in America.
Anthology Selections
TBD