Father Jim Manship’s journey for social and legal justice in East Haven is one Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have understood well.
Fr. Manship, who oversees the St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in New Haven’s Fair Haven neighborhood, came to understand that acting on events was more important than reacting to events and for that reason one needed strategies. His primary message on Martin Luther King Day was that sometimes you have to go outside the community in order to change it from within.
He told his story Monday to a rapt audience of about 200 people at the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. breakfast held this year at the St. Therese Roman Catholic Church in Stony Creek. It is a story of stopping police harassment and abuse of Latinos in East Haven by going outside a small town. Click here to read about the federal investigation.
The sponsors of the annual MLK breakfast event had long sought Fr. Manship as a keynote speaker. Here was another pastor living in a different time who, like Dr. King sought equality for his parishioners. And here was a priest who like Dr. King was arrested and then went on to lead a movement for change. (The Independent first reported his role and his arrest and the subsequent release of a video proving a police coverup.)
The highly publicized events that emanated from Fr. Manship’s arrest in 2009 produced a federal civil rights lawsuit that eventually led to a $450,000 settlement in 2012. From the outset Fr. Manship worked with students and professors from the Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic at the Yale Law School. They filed a class-action lawsuit against East Haven, outlining police violations of civil rights through physical abuse, illegal search and seizure, and entering homes and businesses without permission. There were separate civil and criminal civil-rights investigations by the Department of Justice.
At the breakfast yesterday Fr. Manship explained to the audience that he wished he could have been at this event sooner, but the lawsuits prevented him from speaking publicly.
He told the audience after they finished a breakfast of eggs, sausage and pancakes that in March 2008, he began to learn of the problem from his East Haven parishioners.
There were “unmerited police stops, harassment of Latinos,” all the time. So what they did, he said, was they “hunkered in, they withdrew. It was a way of surviving,” he said. “You huddle in together” to brave the storm.
“Folks talked to me and they were looking to me as the white guy, really, to see if I could figure out a way to navigate this system, to try to get it stopped.” He tried but didn’t get far.
Then, in 2009, he told the audience, “Four of our parishioners were brutally beaten by police at a traffic stop.” That event, he said, was a key moment because now his parishioners were open to talking about what they were facing on a daily basis.
“Prior to that people would take the beatings, take the plea bargains in court. They were terrified of losing work. And the prosecutor would say, just plead guilty, will give you a little fine and you don’t have to come back to court.” There was also the issue of possible deportation.
After they were released, Fr. Manship, said “we asked them what they wanted to do. This group, in particular, they were Ecuadorians, they were community leaders. What they said was ‘we want this to stop. We don’t want anybody else to go through what we just went through. We are a community. We stick together.’”
Fr. Manship paused, remembering Dr. King.
Acting On Ideas
“How do these ideas and the great dreams that Dr. King and others have had over the years, how do these ideas become concrete?” he asked.
One way, he said, is to “relearn the art of public life in our communities. And I think that is the continuation of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s work, bringing people together, around their values and helping them act on it rather than continuing to react to corruption, injustice and the racism surrounding them.
“If you haven’t seen Selma yet,” he said of the recent movie, “I encourage you to do it. It will give you a glimpse of the organizing and strategizing which was very much a part of the civil rights movement, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The same goes with Lima and our organizations. We are 28 congregations all the way to Norwalk. We believe in training our leaders.”
He said: “We spend much of our lives reacting. And when we are reacting we are not free.”
To work together the church’s leaders get to know each other, get to know “our stories,” Fr. Manship said. “… In order to act, we need that ability to act in public life. So it is kind of a nasty word but you need power. Power is the ability to act….”
Then he drew an important distinction concerning strategy. “We can’t fix racism. Racism is a problem. Poverty is a problem. Drug addiction is a problem. Racist police departments are a problem. We teach in our communities and in organizing our leadership to be able to distinguish between a problem and an issue.
“When East Haven was unfolding our leaders and organizers sat down to try to figure out what was the best way, and we quickly realized that in order for something to happen we had to go outside.” By outside he meant mobilizing the law by seeking legal help.
They began by dealing with a racist police department. They tackled another issue more recently, one that concerned daily living. They set out to get driver’s licenses for undocumented residents.
“We sat down with our Yale law team,” Fr. Manship said. “And tucked away in files the team found a federal government memo saying undocumented people could get a driver’s license.”
He ended his 25-minute talk by asking the audience to join him and others in future actions.
Cathyann Roding, director of choral groups at Branford High School, assembled her students for a final song. “That was so powerful,“she told Fr. Manship as the audience stood for many minutes in applause.
When the student program drew to a close the audience stood, linking arms to sing the now familiar words of “We Shall Overcome.”
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