His real name was Ed Grant. He pioneered “environmental justice” before anyone invented the phrase.
Edward B. Grant’s mission took hold in the 1960s. He died on Jan. 1 at the age of 87; the mission will continue.
In that mission, Ed Grant made no distinction between the quest for a clean environment and organizing the grassroots to challenge power.
The mission started in 1962, with a broom. Dixwell, his neighborhood, needed sweeping. Soon he had a neighborhood imitating a fictional character, “Freddie Fixer,” sweeping the streets and marching for social change. The name was technically a riff on Grant’s comrade in community-rousing, Dr. Fred Smith. (The full story of how that happened appears later in this article.) Grant would remain the inspiration and personification of the event for decades to come. He became Freddie Fixer.
The idea caught on so much that a Freddie Fixer Parade—the black community’s largest annual outdoor event — grew up around the clean-up. It attracted other black pride events to go along with it, filling up entire weekends some years. Black firefighters and cops and other groups travel from states around to march in the parade.
Through the Freddie Fixer organization, Grant also pioneered the first organized recycling in town when recycling returned to fashion in the 1980s.
His decades of environmental activism earned him New Haven’s first-ever “Green Award” in 2005 (he’s pictured in top photo receiving the award, with Mayor John DeStefano at left).
Confronting Power
That’s what Ed Grant will most be remembered for. His activism went well beyond Freddie Fixer. During the heyday of social-change activism in New Haven in the 1960s, he helped to organize groups like the Black Coalition and the Angry Young Black Men. He knew people in power well. He negotiated with them from the grassroots. While his name didn’t always make headlines, he was in the middle of history in the making.
Like many other black activists, he was offered money to inform on the political dissidents for overreaching law enforcement agencies in the 1960s. “You know damn well, you’re talking to the wrong man right now!” he remembered responding.
He reflected on a lifetime’s worth of lessons in this interview with Sarah Raymond. Click on the links below to hear him describe some of those lessons:
• Near-Riots and Police Informers
• Civil Rights Days in New Orleans
• Teaching and Talking about Change
One Bugle, One Drum
In fact, the origins of the Freddie Fixer clean-up mixed environmentalism with a challenge to power. Larry Young (pictured), who inherited the Freddie Fixer Parade mantle, told the story to the Independent‘s Allan Appel in 2007.
“When I took this job,” Young said then, “Ed Grant sat me down and made sure to tell me the history of the parade, which not everyone really knows.” He remembered Grant telling him that “Freddie Fixer is not an African-American event, or a Puerto Rican event, or a white event. It’s an ecology event.”
When it started in the early ‘60s, Grant told Young, he and a fellow Dixwell leader, Dr. Fred Smith, “wanted to show the community was taking care of itself. They also wanted to point out that Dixwell was not getting its fair share of city services — there were even some houses back then that still had dirt floors.”
So they started a march, with just seven people, one bugle, and one drum. They marched around the block. Neighbors joined, one by one, and helped clean up trash. Winos joined in, sweeping up glass.
The next year they decided to take the march downtown. City officials hesitated to grant permission. Smith had pull; he was a housing commissioner, and the city’s first black police commissioner. He intervened; the parade route extended downtown.
The parade wasn’t called Freddie Fixer at first. Then one day Grant and company were drumming up interest at the old Winchester School. They asked the kids what to name the parade. “Freddie the Fixer,” one kids piped up, referring to Dr. Smith. The name stuck, minus the “the.”
Monday Funeral
A funeral service commemorating Grant’s life will take place at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church at 111 Whalley Ave. Monday at 11 a.m. Grant belonged to the church his whole life; he was a member of the vestry board and the Men’s Club, and he oversaw the young adult fellowship.
Grant’s burial will take place at Hamden Plains Cemetery.
Grant is survived by sons Edward Grant Jr. of Sydney Australia, Bruce Grant (Mary) of Atlanta; a daughter, Marilyn Grant of Fairfax, Va.; a brother, Avbrey Grant of New Haven; two grandchildren, Lauren Grand and Lowell Grant of Atlanta; amd greatgrand Jaylen Hunter also of Atlanta. He was predeceased by his wife, Virginia Grant; daughter DeVeria Grant, and brother William Grant.
Thank you, Mr. Grant. You'll be missed.