Melanie Crean
If Justice Is A Woman.
The group stands on the steps of the courtyard. It means something that the women are occupying that space. It also means something that they’re not inside. Each of them exudes strength and resilience on her own. Bound together, their power seems to multiply. Melanie Crean’s If Justice Is A Woman is the final commission for Artspace’s “Revolution On Trial,” an exhibit running until Oct. 17 examining the Black Panther trials and May Day protests in 1970. Crean’s photograph received an unveiling on Friday at Artspace on Orange and Crown. That reception was another chance to revisit the legacy of the trials and protests, which continues to shape the city to this day.
Crean’s project for “Revolution on Trial” began with an initial question about how much the judicial system might have changed since the 1970 May Day trials. But the more she thought about it, the more she thought that “so much has remained the same,” she said. Visiting the courthouse where the trials had taken place, she was struck by the murals adorning the interior, painted in 1913 by Thomas Gilbert White. Justice in those murals was a White figure, and in the same sense that little had changed since 1970, Crean felt the mural reflected how the justice system remained “not representative of the people in this country.”
It also struck her that figures of justice across cultures are often female, from the blind Lady Justice and her scales, to the goddess Athena in Greek mythology, to the Egyptian goddess Maat. So she thought she might ask nine Black, Brown, and Indigenous women community leaders in New Haven — Diane Brown, Beatrice Codianni, Sharon Dickey, Kerry Ellington, Debbie Elmore, Barbara Fair, Hanan Hameen, and Hope Metcalf — what justice meant to them. Talks about organizing it began in 2018. Brown, branch manager at Stetson Library on Dixwell Avenue, offered the library’s space for the women to meet.
“It felt like we were meeting in someone’s house,” Crean said. The women told one another their stories and “we started to think about how to visualize themes from people’s pasts.” Four themes that emerged from the discussions were power, resistance, struggle, and hope and healing. A further meeting was planned for April. The idea was to create a video project that wove all their stories and perspectives together. Then the pandemic-related shutdowns began and the idea of meeting in person became impossible.
Crean switched up her project in time for the opening of “Revolution on Trial” in the summer. In her installment, she put together fragments of interviews with her nine subjects to tell a broader story of struggle and hope. Meanwhile, the women thought of other ways to bring in the visual component they had been talking about before the pandemic began — to depict three generations of women leaders and what binds them together. To Crean, the women — who had invited each other, one by one, to participate in the project — hadn’t created a power structure, but a network.
“Instead of something hierarchical, it was tensile,” Crean said. It was a model of “connectivity” and “defiance,” and that, to Crean, was the source of their strength as a community.
The women were finally able to meet again in August, and Crean had ideas to use fabric to join them together, on the steps of the courthouse building where the trials had taken place, and where those 1913 murals were. They batted around ideas. One involved possibly wrapping the women in fabric around the four columns. But they settled on the image on Artspace’s wall. Taken in September — and including Diane Brown’s and Barbara Fair’s granddaughters — it was a document of their power.
“If we were going to do one” image, Crean said, “this is the one.”
Diane Brown had been involved with the project from its beginning in 2018, and knew “Melanie wanted to feature women in New Haven,” she said. “I was really happy that my granddaughter was asked. She’s the same age I was when the trials happened. I’m trying to teach her what’s going on in the world, and allowing her to form her own opinions, just as my mother did for me.
Diane’s mother Lillian Brown — who died in 2018 at the age of 100 — was a powerful political voice in Newhallville and a pillar of city politics for decades. The Black Panthers were an integral part of her upbringing.
“I regret I never saved my Black Panther newspapers, because we got them all,” Brown said. “My mother didn’t miss. It was dinner talk.”
Brown recalled that during the 1970 trials — when she was 13 — she marched with her mother down Shelton Avenue to Dixwell to the courthouse, where she met a mixed crowd of Black protestors and Yale students who had joined them. She was unable to enter the courtroom, but some of the college students, relaying information from the courtroom, told her how “the Panthers were defending themselves.”
“They were educated people…. They knew the law. For someone to tell me they were in the courtroom defending themselves,” at the same time they were being talked about in the media as if they were “terrorists,” Brown said, “that made me feel very proud.”
She was with her mother at the May Day protests as well, recalling the National Guard troops at the ready that day, the “snipers on top of the courthouse.”
For Brown, the legacy of the 1970 trials is “me,” she said. The Panthers “installed a certain sense of pride. They taught us things,” she continued, about Black history and culture, creating a deep well of strength from which Brown still draws. “I’m 62 and I’m still in the struggle. I’m still inspired by Angela Davis and Ericka Huggins. The legacy is me. Lifelong impact.”
For Brown, the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer carried with them the weight of history and the recognition of the past. If, as Crean said, the judicial system hadn’t fundamentally changed since 1970, neither had the integrated face of protest against it. “This is nothing new,” she recalled telling her family on seeing the protests, and Black, Brown, and White people marching together. “I’ve seen it already,” she added.
“The fabric weaves us together, keeping us connected, but we’re still standing strong,” said Hanan Hameen, another of the nine women in the group, of the image on Artspace’s wall. Hameen also grew up with the legacy of the Panthers. Former Black Panther member and current activist George Edwards is her cousin, and her mother was also affiliated. Her father is celebrated drummer and teacher Jesse Hameen II.
“I grew up in a household that was very conscious, very aware,” she said. “I grew up being proud to be Black.” She recalled being a gifted and talented student in New Haven’s schools who also developed a reputation for her unapologetic outspokenness.
As an adult and the founder of the Artsucation Academy Network, she uses, and teaches others to use, “the arts to speak out and educate,” she said. For her students, and as she works toward a doctorate in education focusing on getting STEAM curricula to Black students, she aims to show them “that you can be proud of who you are, and that you can use your voice.” Whether that voice emerges through music, dance, writing, or science, she said, “it is relevant and they can use it.”
She had just returned from a trip to Senegal — her first — when the picture was taken. The trip was part of an arts exchange and community building program, she said. But her experience of the trip was also “confirmation,” she said. “I felt at home, at rest, at peace. I felt like just a person, and that I’d never felt before.” In the United States, she said, she felt there was always a label on her — she was a Black person, she was a female person, and it affected the way she moved through her life. In Senegal, she said, there were no labels on her.
“It was just unity, love,” she said.
While the historic murals may not have changed since 1970, the people on the bench sure have changed. Our Supreme Court Chief Justice, Richard Robinson, is a black man who owes his position to Republican support . At the trial level, I appear before far more women than men, not surprisingly as law schools have had more women than men for decades. (The current Dean of UConn Law School is a black woman.)