New Haven Independent

“The time is now,” said Dozier-Taylor, a longtime Dwight community activist and owner of A Walk In Truth bookstore. “But don’t get me wrong, the time has always been now.”

She wasn’t the only one to stand up and send out a call to action. She was joined by a panel of community activists, entrepreneurs, and public servants who shared their thoughts Saturday on family, private property, and the state, as they pertain to New Haven’s black community, at the fourth annual Black History Celebration at Gateway Community College.

Ronald Sullivan [pictured] said he senses a political climate change that may motivate the general public to become more involved in politics and civil society.

“The war specifically has sparked an engagement in politics that we haven’t seen in some time,” Sullivan said. “These are dangerous and scary times and people feel like they have a greater stake in the outcome.”

Although the panelists all said a diversity of tactics needs to be employed to correct the issues of over-incarceration and poverty, there was an ideological rift which put people into two separate camps, Sullivan said. The tension boils down to the classic dichotomy of nature vs. nurture.

On the one hand, speakers like Amos Smith, President and CEO of Community Action Agency, said families need to stay together, with the elderly looking after the young, and the middle-aged taking financial responsibility of the household.

“Right now we are promoting a family model that is inconsistent with our needs as a community,” Smith said

Lorraine Caldwell, a marketing executive who has worked with a slew of alcohol brands, said the problems come not only from the demise of the family structure, but also the lack of financial literacy.

Lt. Marie Barnes, a correctional officer at Cheshire CI, the state’s largest high-security prison, said about half of the young prisoners she comes into contact with are “unreachable.” Others, she said, use their time trying to get their life together for when they get out. (To read a previous story on employment programs for ex-prisoners click here.)

On the other hand, prison reformer and community activist Barbara Fair said the problems have more to do with the environment that children are forced into, than the things their parents do when they raise them. A child who lives in the suburbs, Fair said, is not constantly tempted and influenced by drug dealers, aggressive alchohol marketing in the black community, or gangs.

“Racism,” Fair said. “That’s the name of the big elephant in the middle of the room that nobody is talking about.”

Fair said her son was arrested and incarcerated for dealing drugs, despite her best efforts to steer him from that path.

“It’s too easy to just look at the parents, to say that they are the problem,” Fair said. “But if we just want to forget about the incarceration system, the educational system, and the Department of Children and Families (DCF) “” as long as we turn a blind eye to them, and just continue saying that it’s us, the parents “” we will continue to be lost. We can’t forget we are talking about a billion dollar industry here.”

Her organization, People Against Injustice, is currently working on a campaign to make the state Department of Corrections more accountable to the public, and to offer adequate health care for inmates. Currently the state merely deposits unwanted prisoners in mental-health facilities and drugs them up, she said.

Fair points to the police department’s tactic of saturating certain neighborhoods (recently ended), and to the lack of alternatives to incarceration in the city, to explain why so many African Americans wind up in Connecticut’s prisons for drug offenses. This year, the number of people incarcerated for possession is nearly twice what it was last year, according to DOC annual statistics. To see how many people are in CT prisons and for what, click here. Twenty-one drug arrests were made in six weeks in the Kensington neighborhood alone.

“With the more police they put out there, the more aggressive policies they adopt, I haven’t seen the community get any safer,” Fair said.

Dozier-Taylor agreed. “You don’t send a wolf in to save the chickens,” she said. “Change has to come from the community.”

She expanded on that idea after the forum.

“You’ve got community, which is natural: it is the grassroots and it is grounded in reality,” Dozier-Taylor said. “Then you have politics, which is Astroturf. It looks all right, but it’s not real.”

The forum also served as a first step towards creating an organized coalition of religious leaders, community activists, and public servants, and general members of the community. After the panel, the Black History Coalition collected surveys from visitors, asking what issues most affect their communities and what they are willing to do about it.