Paul Ritter, a pastor from North Carolina who championed the poor and the elderly in his adopted city for half a century, died on Oct. 8. An obituary attributed his death to cancer. He was 82.
Ritter came to Hartford from his native North Carolina in 1969, taking an assistant pastor post at Bethel A.M.E. Church and then becoming senior pastor at Warburton Community Congregational Church, The Courant reported in 2001, when Ritter announced his third bid for mayor. Ritter led the southwestern city church for 25 years, before retiring in 1997.
Although Ritter nursed political ambitions — he ran three times for mayor of Hartford, never successfully — he left his mark on the city advocating for its vulnerable: poor tenants, the sick and the elderly. His work straddled Hartford’s twin bastions of power: the local Democratic town committee, and the clergy.
In the early 90s, Ritter had pushed for a controversial, publicly-funded apartment building for people living with HIV/AIDS. Neighbors of the proposed site on Wethersfield Avenue objected; some HIV/AIDS activists opposed it themselves, fearing the “apartment buildings would become a ghetto, almost like a leper colony,” The Courant reported in 1992. Nine years later, Ritter and a group of city clergy eventually opened a building in the North End for people living with HIV/AIDS and their families, called Zezzo House.
Ritter had long been a voice for those living in Hartford’s public housing, much of it dilapidated, ridden with vermin and difficult for the elderly and disabled to navigate. In 1977, his Brookfield Street church was ransacked after he spoke at a rally for low income tenants, the sixth time in 12 months his church had been burglarized, The Courant reported. Earlier that year, its windows had been shot out after Ritter led a demonstration to rid a housing project of rats and roaches.
A thread running through Ritter’s half-century in Hartford was a proximity to the fray of whichever social justice battle was roiling the city. In 1973, The Courant wrote, Ritter led a protest of Community Renewal Team, alleging the Hartford anti-poverty agency was misusing funds earmarked for feeding the elderly. In 2000, he was among 22 pastors, activists and local and state politicians arrested during a sit-in outside the Avery Heights retirement community on New Britain Avenue.
In 2001, after failing in 1979 and 1993, Ritter ran for mayor as a petitioning Democrat. Ritter, badly burned in a fire at his home in 1995, told a Courant reporter he felt God had kept him alive to lead the city. He lost, however, to Eddie Perez.
Ritter is survived by seven children, 12 grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, four sisters, a former wife and “a host of loving family and friends,” his obituary reads. Funeral services will be held in Ritter’s native North Carolina, at 2 p.m. Oct. 22 at the Bellview AME Zion Church, 128 Bellview Road, Robbins, N.C. A memorial service will also be held in Hartford, at 4 p.m. Oct. 28 at the Victory Cathedral, 205 Bellevue St.
His family suggests that memorial contributions be made to the Greater Hartford NAACP, P.O. Box 1012, Hartford CT 06143.