Peace Tree Takes Root At Sound School

Alex Morquecho and Jacob Smith crouched atop a raised bed of waterfront soil to uncover the city’s latest tribute to a hoped-for world without violence, alongside a newly planted ​“peace tree.”

Morquecho, 16, and Smith, 16, are both students at The Sound School in City Point. 

That’s where, on Thursday morning, they joined dozens of their peers and teachers as well as New Haven Peace Commission members, Mayor Justin Elicker, Alders Evette Hamilton and Carmen Rodriguez, and ​“Atomic Veteran” Hank Bolden for a sun-dappled ceremony celebrating International Day of Peace, which the United Nations observes each year on Sept. 21.

Peace to him means the ​“tranquility that comes as a result of freedom from disturbances,” said Morquecho, a Sound School junior who lives in Fair Haven. That also applies to the environment, the oceans, the earth. ​“Let’s be peaceful to not only ourselves, but to our environment” too.

That proved a fitting message on Thursday as the centerpiece of the event was a newly planted Chinese fringetree, the latest ​“peace tree” monument that the the city’s peace commission has installed in different parts of New Haven on a roughly annual basis since 2008.

“Peace and the environment are inextricably linked,” Peace Commissioner Aaron Goode said. He thanked the Urban Resources Initiative (URI) for the help with this year’s planting and listed the many other locations around the city where peace trees have already been planted, including at Wexler Grant, High School in the Community, and Southern Connecticut State University.

This latest planting furthers ​“our vision where symbols of peace outnumber, outweigh the signs of conflict and violence,” he added.

Reading directly from the plaque that now sits at the base of the peace tree, Smith read: ​“We mourn every victim of street violence and war as we work for peace.”

One of the featured speakers at Thursday’s ceremony was Henry ​“Hank” Bolden, a New Haven native and accomplished jazz musician who, in 1955, suffered from exposure to nuclear weapons at a U.S. Army testing site in Nevada. 

“I was part of a group of eight African Americans that was deliberately selected to be a guinea pig to achieve what the government wanted,” which was to know how Black soldiers in particular could endure such dangerous levels of exposure to ionizing radiation. An Army private at the time, he said he had no idea what he was walking into. No one in the group did. 

Bolden has suffered the consequences of that brutal treatment, having been diagnosed with multiple myeloma and bladder cancer and glaucoma, among other side effects.

He stood alongside the mayor and fellow peace activists and students on Thursday to speak out not just against the brutal treatment he endured — but also in support of the peace tree and plaque and the messages they conveyed of a world where such violence has ceased to exist.