City’s ​“Other Sides” Revealed

When Flemming ​“Nick” Norcott Jr. was growing up in the Dwight/Kensington neighborhood in the 1940s and ​’50s, Prospect Hill wasn’t the only ​“other side” of town that was off limits to Black families like his. 

“There were a lot of ​‘other sides’ then,” the retired former state Supreme Court justice remembered at a Wednesday evening book talk. ​“As a young boy, a pre-teen, a teen, we couldn’t go to Westville. We couldn’t go to Morris Cove. We couldn’t go to Wooster Square, because there would be consequences that would be really, really bad.”

Norcott, who chairs the Board of Directors of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, shared those memories Wednesday night during the question-and-answer section of a book talk held in the second-floor reading room at the Stetson Library at 197 Dixwell Ave.

The book in question was The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City, a landmark new study of the Great Migration, the criminal justice system, gun violence, segregation, and the Newhallville neighborhood, written by author Nicholas Dawidoff.

Dawidoff — a Pulitzer Prize-finalist author and New Yorker contributor who grew up and lives in New Haven — has been making the rounds of local libraries and community radio shows, reading excerpts from and telling the stories behind his newly published deep-dive exploration of the 2006 murder of Pete Fields and the wrongful conviction of 16-year-old Bobby Johnson.

On Wednesday night at Stetson, Dawidoff joined local civil rights attorney Michael Jefferson before an audience of roughly 50 New Haveners to talk about the successive waves of migration that made Newhallville an ​“iconic” American neighborhood and the eight years of research and writing that went into this book.

“I really wanted to know how this had come to be,” Dawidoff said about racial and economic segregation in New Haven. He first became aware of that segregation as a young kid biking across New Haven for summer baseball leagues. He gained a deeper understanding while conducting more than 500 interviews for The Other Side of Prospect.

“This is a book of unusual power and importance. This is a universal story, but it’s our book too in New Haven,” Community Foundation CEO William Ginsberg said at the start of Wednesday’s event.

The Community Foundation provided free copies of the book for everyone who attended the talk. It did so because ​“this book is about all of us,” Ginsberg said. ​“It’s about how divided we are as a community,” both metaphorically and literally by social-geographic boundaries like Prospect Street.

Jefferson agreed. This book is ​“riveting,” he said, in how it tells the story of Newhallville and of ​“the indignities and injustices suffered and endured by Black people in the South” before migrating North to cities like New Haven to work at major industrial employers like Winchester Arms.

Norcott was one of the first attendees to raise his hand during the question-and-answer segment and speak about his own first-hand experiences growing up in a city defined by ​“other sides.” 

“We grew up in those areas, those Black pockets, where our fathers and mothers were imprisoned by limited opportunities,” Norcott said. ​“And that prison is just as dramatic as anything you’ve expressed in your book.”

He said he spent much of his youth in Dixwell and Newhallville. He recalled how ​“Malcolm X used to do some preaching here on Dixwell Avenue, right by Fat Daddy’s barbershop.” He said that he and his teenage friends used to go and listen as the great Civil Rights-era orator would address New Haven’s predominantly Black neighborhoods.

“He looked at Yale. He looked at all these pockets. And he said to the audience: New Haven is a tough little nut. It still is a tough little nut,” Norcott recalled.

Norcott urged those in attendance Wednesday night to recognize that the answers to many of the toughest questions raised by Dawidoff’s book about violence in New Haven aren’t necessarily to be found ​“in a glorified room like this,” but rather ​“out there” on those same streets of Dixwell and Newhallville.

Marlene Miller-Pratt — a founder of the memorial botanical healing garden for those touched by gun violence — spoke of divides that existed even within her own home neighborhood of Newhallville when she was growing up.

One side of the neighborhood sent students to Hillhouse High School. The other had kids ​“trudge over the hill” to Wilbur Cross.

Miller-Pratt went to Hillhouse and studied alongside classmates from Brookside and Rockview and other predominantly Black working-class parts of town. Her neighbors at Cross went to school in a more racially integrated environment — and were exposed to classmates from whiter, wealthier parts of the city who she said were forbidden by their own families to visit friends in Newhallville after class.

“Newhallville was divided in that sense, too,” she said.

City public school teacher Dee Marshall spoke about how her young students still marvel at the hard-to-comprehend wealth and relative isolation of Yale University when compared to struggling parts of town. She asked Dawidoff: ​“Is there still another side of Prospect?”

Dawidoff replied that the title of his book is taken from one of Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s most famous speeches, about ​“The Other America.”

He said that speech and his book title raise the question: ​“Which side is the other side?”

“The problem” at the center of his book — and in New Haven still — ​“is division,” he continued. This book ​“is a way of expressing it.”

How would you recommend New Haveners ​“reconcile” this traumatic history of slavery, segregation, and violence in this city? asked Kebra Smith-Bolden. 

Dawidoff said that one of the biggest takeaways from his working on this book is just how important is it for people ​“to be heard on an individual level,” ​“people being able to express the fullness of their experience.”

“A long way goes,” he said, ​“for getting the sense that other people care” and are willing to listen and understand someone in their full complexity.

Click on the videos below to watch recent interviews Dawidoff has done with Babz Rawls-Ivy on WNHH FM’s ​“LoveBabz LoveTalk” and with Paul Bass on WNHH’s ​“Dateline New Haven.”