New Haven Independent

Dawson joined community organizers, tenants advocates, and neighborhood kids with their parents Saturday at the second annual West Rock/West Hills Community Pride Day. The event brings together two neighborhood separated by the cliffs of West Rock.

“I am definitely with the Stop The Violence movement,” Dawson said at a ceremony held in his name. “If everybody gets together, we can make New Haven a much better place.”

In the last two years, West Rock residents have been getting together, and they say it is making a difference.

Curtis Jennings (pictured in the top photo, at Dawson’s left) said the West Rock community is the only one in the city not to have a shooting last summer.

“That did not happen by happenstance,” Jennings said, but rather because the concerned citizens and the block watches kept things under control.

Jennings represents Brookside in the United Tenants Residents Council, and serves on the Implementation Committee for the Brookside and Rockview redevelopment.

Harper Avenue block watch member Felix Rivas moved from Trenton, N.J., to New Haven eight years ago to raise a family. He said he can’t imagine a better place to do that than the neighborhood he lives in now, which he said is enriched by athletic fields and public parks. Still, he said keeping the neighborhood safe requires a strategy, which he broke down into two key components.

“Trying to keep kids off the street is one thing,” Rivas said. “Trying to keep the community together, that’s another.”

This summer, the housing authority and city are sponsoring more programs in the area, largely as a result of pressure from the West Rock Concerned Citizens and United TRCs, said Honda Smith-Saunders, a founding member of the Concerned Citizens who also sits on the West Rock Implementation Committee.

Cassandra Lang is a West Rock Concerned Citizen who helped organize the community pride day on a shoestring budget of less than $350. She said the event was about giving West Rockers a sense of pride and ownership in their community, which she and others in her group refer to as “the forgotten neighborhood.”

“I told you before — we are on a move. We’re going to move them whether they want to be moved or not,” Lang said.

The event was also the first performance by the Westville Manor Stomppers Drill Team, which was formed three weeks ago, Lang said. The housing authority provided a bus to get the kids from Westville Manor over to Valley Street for the march, but the team is coached and managed by residents.

Shatia Morrison, 15, came up with the slogan emblazoned along the team’s banner: “Stompping to the Beat, Stompping out Violence.” She said the drill team is something for kids her age to do during the summer. She said she looks forward to having more parades in her neighborhood, and to raising enough money for uniforms and drums.

Other drill teams and a dance squad from the broader New Haven area — mostly organized by volunteers without an office or an official dance studio to call their own — marched in the parade with The Westville Manor Stomppers.

Jhunathyn Ellis (pictured at right, with his son) said his motorcycle club sponsors drill teams because “it teaches them discipline and gives them a sense of ownership in something they really poured their hearts and souls and blood, sweat, and tears into.”

Jermaine Smalls (pictured to the left of Ellis) has helped coach the Mob Squad drill team for the past two and a half years. Smalls is also a member of The Cummyssion M.C. As a kid Smalls drummed in The Nation, another drill team the motorcycle club started— and supports financially, Smalls said.

Valley Street resident Al Shakir founded the motorcycle club and two drill teams. At the block party held on Harper Avenue after the parade, Shakir recalled a history of involvement in the community that spanned 20 years.

“Many many moons ago, I went off to Eastern Connecticut State University to go to college,”
Shakir said. “While I was there I hooked up with some of the fraternities and sororities,
got connected. When I came back to Newhalville — it was the summer of 1984 — there was nothing to do.” So with a handful of kids he started a drill team called the Nation. He remembers Smalls from when he was a drummer on the team, and watched him grow up to become a coach. In 1994, Shakir started Mob Squad.

Smalls said the biggest challenge has been finding sponsors and volunteers for his groups, one of which is headed off to Jacksonville, Florida, for a world championship competition. His group is trying to raise $11,000 for a bus to get the team to Florida and back. So far they are $8,000 short, he said.

The event ended with a free-jam session of Davis Street students and their teacher, William Fluker, pictured with 12 year old Jarrad McCowny.