“We Didn’t Come To Play”

Washington, D.C. — Outraged by recent school shootings, 20 teens from around New Haven rode an overnight bus down to the nation’s capital to join an historic, youth-led ​“March for Our Lives.”

The very first protest for many of the high-school students from New Haven, Hamden and Ansonia, the March for Our Lives gave them the chance to add their voices in a loud demand for gun control — not just in response to school shootings, but also against the street warfare that has plagued cities for decades.

A month after a shooter killed 17 in Parkland, Florida, America’s youth have launched a nationwide movement against gun violence, calling out politicians for accepting the National Rifle Association’s donations, leading school walk-outs (like at Co-Op and Cross), and putting on a massive march in Washington, D.C.

Organizers expected 500,000 people to fill the streets near Capitol Hill on Saturday, and another 800 marches were planned around the globe.

New Haven students were part of a delegation from the National Urban League with nearly 1,000 teens from 15 cities. (Click here for Ethan Fry’s account of the simultaneous March for Our Lives rally back home in Shelton, here for Lucy Gellman’s account of the rally in Hartford, and here for Christine Stuart’s and Jack Kramer’s accounts of the rallies in Hartford and in Guilford.)

The New Haven teens traveled all night to make it to Saturday’s protest. Accompanied by a few chaperones, they left from Stetson Library on a 4 a.m. bus. Empty seats were filled up on a pit stop in Harlem, which was delayed by a few kids who were stuck on the subway.

When the teens finally pulled up to the convention center in Washington, D.C., representatives from 15 other Urban Leagues were already on stage, calling for them to join. Shy and sleepy, the New Haven contingent demurred.

But teens from Florida’s Broward County, which includes Parkland, jumped in next. ​“What do we want?” they yelled. ​“Justice!” ​“When do we want it?” ​“Now!” ​“If we don’t get it?” ​“Shut it down!”

Before the speeches started, Bryte Corey, a senior at the Engineering and Science University Magnet School (ESUMS) from Quinnipiac Meadows, said he’d been nervous about political activism, especially when it involved traveling so far from home.

But within the first half-hour on Pennsylvania Avenue, he said all the action was ​“exhilarating.” ​“The music, the chants, the amount of people,” he said in awe. ​“I’m already trying to get my confidence up to go to more in New Haven.”

Corey said he’d like to see Congress make it tougher for those with a history of mental illness to get a gun, and he said he planned to get in touch with Showing Up for Racial Justice back home.

Aside from a few celebrity performers, like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jennifer Hudson, no adult took the stage on Saturday afternoon. Led instead by Marjory Stoneman Douglas high schoolers (including one who was so nervous she threw up in the middle of her speech), the line-up featured survivors of both school massacres and drive-by ambushes.

In three hours of speeches, they asked Congress to ban military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, strengthen federal background checks, raise the age to purchase a gun and institute waiting periods. They called the Trump administration’s idea of arming teachers a non-starter, and they said they wouldn’t be happy with minimal changes, like outlawing bump stocks.

Legislators had failed to act after first-graders were slaughtered in Newtown, after massacres in movie theaters, churches and nightclubs. If the politicians refused to act this time, they could expect a backlash at the voting booth in November, the speakers said. This was legislators’ last chance, they warned, before the kids took charge.

“Mr. Trump, Congress, the Senate and all elected leaders of America, you have failed us, and we have had enough of your NRA agenda. If you took money from the NRA, you bring that check to the bank and put it in your retirement account, because we’re going to vote you out,” said Jackson Middleman, who survived the 2012 shooting in Newtown and has been organizing ever since. ​“The Sandy Hook mass shooting should have been the last in the nation, but there are more and more every single day. Apparently, Sandy Hook was not enough for America to make the changes, but after Parkland, we feel hope.”

The crowd of hundreds of thousands, which stretched on without a visible end for blocks and blocks, started spontaneously chanting, ​“Vote them out! Vote them out!”

Based on the protest, the kids are prepared for a take-over. Even though some are still in elementary school, they’ve been forced to confront how gun violence has affected their communities and what they want to see done about it.

An 11-year-old girl from Alexandria, Va., called for the crowd to remember the young black girls whose shootings ​“don’t make the front page.” A 17-year-old from South Los Angeles asked the crowd to understand the wider community who’d been traumatized by each shooting, becoming numb with each candlelight vigil and flowered funeral. And a 16-year-old in Washington, D.C., asked for local government to expand gun-free zones for all students to walk to school, college and recreation centers without worry.

“Since this movement began, people keep asking me, Do you think any change is going to come from this?” asked Cameron Kasky, a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. ​“Look around: We are the change. My generation, having spent our entire lives seeing mass shooting after mass shooting, has learned that our voices are powerful and our votes matter.”

Donald R. Cravins, Jr., the National Urban League’s senior vice president for policy, reminded the audience of primarily African-American youth that, when they held up signs on Pennsylvania Avenue, they were participating in a long tradition.

“I want you to be proud out there, I want you to hold your head up a little higher than everybody else [because] we are part of a legacy. Black folks have been having this conversation with America since the days we arrived on her shores,” Cravins said. ​“The first massive African-American march took place in 1917 in New York, when [about 10,000] teenagers took to the streets to protest the lynchings that were occurring in St. Louis, Missouri. Why do we march? Because sometimes we have to march for those who couldn’t make it here today.”

That lineage continued with the protests of the civil-rights movement, against fire hoses in Birmingham and tear gas in Ferguson, Cravins said. Just as those actions drew attention to longstanding and seemingly intractable issues, the March for Our Lives could do the same for gun violence.

“The threats of mass shooting at school have become part of a generation. It’s a terrible thing, and it must end now. But we, members of the Urban League movement, we march because our black and brown activists, our teenagers in neglected neighborhoods, have been crying out for help for decades about the gun violence that plagues our inner cities. And no one listened,” Cravins said.

“Today, let our black and brown faces be a constant reminder that, yes, we want an end to school violence, but we also want an end to all gun violence,” he went on. ​“This country has an obligation to change that.”

That line was echoed onstage throughout Saturday’s protests, from those who’d been traumatized by bloodshed in urban areas. They pointed out that shootings in poor neighborhoods were longstanding; and their causes, systemic.

“Chicago’s violence epidemic didn’t start overnight. it was caused by big problems we are still not dealing with to this day,” said one teen. ​“When you have a city that feels we need more bikes in downtown Chicago for tourists, rather than more funding for workforce programs to get guys off the streets into jobs, you have gun violence. When you have a governor who feels that funding anti-violence programs is ​‘non-essential spending,’ you have gun violence. When you have elected officials who feel that getting a couple more dollars from the NRA is more important than their actual constituents, you have gun violence. And when you have a president who constantly belittles the problems, rather than sending resources, you have gun violence.

“It’s time for the nation to realize that gun violence is not a Chicago problem; it is an American problem,” he said. ​“We’re here demanding what we, as people of this country, deserve: the right to have a life free from the fear of being gunned down.”

Listening on Pennsylvania Avenue, the New Haven teenagers held up signs: ​“We did not come to play,” ​“Hold them accountable,” and ​“Activism knows no age,” they read. They whooped and chanted.

“We are the future, and the future starts now,” they yelled out.

Almost all of the New Haven kids were stepping out in protest for the very first time. A set of twins from Hamden said they wanted their voices to be heard. The two sisters said they wanted to buck the usual portrayal of teens as apathetic.

They were ​“standing up for what we believe in,” said Christian Pommills.

Did they think they’d make a difference? ​“It’ll take a lot of time,” said Adaysha Milner, her sister.

“Even if there’s no change, we’ll force people to look at what’s wrong,” Pommills said. ​“Being African-American, we lose kids daily. Enough is enough. We’re not here to play.”

Marvyl Ellis, a junior from Ansonia, was more hesitant. He said he was listening to see what laws people wanted to see changed. But he said something had to be done.

“It’s kinda scary [to go to school],” he said. ​“You don’t know if you’re going to make it home anymore.”

Valerie Shultz-Wilson, the president of Southern Connecticut’s Urban League, said she hoped that the march would inspire the next civil-rights leaders, thirsting for justice.

“The time is now for us to pass the torch,” she said. ​“I think they’re in this group, these kids are here en masse. This is history-making, it really is.”