Chris Randall Photo
The scene on the Green.
Lucy Gellman Photo
Sanders on New Haven’s Green Sunday night.
The largest political crowd in decades filled the Green Sunday night as Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders brought his income-inequality message to New Haven with an Elm City twist: contrasting Yale’s $25.57 billion endowment with the struggles of young people in the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods.
“Many of our people are not working one job or two jobs, they’re working three jobs,” said the Vermont U.S. senator, who has waged a vigorous challenge to frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination Hillary Clinton. The two square off in Connecticut’s primary on Tuesday.
Estimates of Sunday night’s crowd ran as high as 14,000 — apparently the largest crowd for a political event on the Green since the 1970 Mayday protests on behalf of the Black Panthers on trial for murder in New Haven.
“This is a lot of people. Thank you New Haven!” Sanders said in taking the stage.
He spoke of his candidacy as “a revolution that will not just elect a president” but will “transform the United States.”
“We need an economy that works for all of us, not just the one percent,” Sanders thundered, to roars from the crowd. “Right now, here, in the great city of New Haven, we see almost a metaphor for what’s happening throughout this country. Right here in this great city, we have one of the outstanding institutions of higher education all over the world.
“That’s what Yale University is, and we should be proud of this great university. But a few miles away from here in this same city, we have children who are getting totally inadequate educations. Right here — one of the great universities in the world. A few blocks away from here, kids who in a million years would never dream that they could get a college education. Right here we have a university that has an endowment of 24 billion dollars, but all over this city and in this state, we have children who are living in desperate poverty. In this city alone, 36 percent of children are living in poverty.”
“Tell it! Tell it!” voices in the crowd responded.
“Brothers and sisters, if this country is going to survive in any moral sense, in any sustainable economic sense, we are going to change our national priorities,” he added. “How does it happen that we have millions, trillions of dollars to spend on a war in Iraq we never should have gotten into, but somehow we do not have the funds available to rebuild our inner cities or provide decent education for our children? We are going to change those priorities.”
Sanders used that initial pitch as a springboard for the evening, tying each pillar of his campaign back to Connecticut, and specifically to the future of New Haven’s youth, while assuring attendees that “this campaign is listening to our brothers and sisters in the African-American” and Latino communities. His hope for the state to do better, he said, citing Governor Dannel Malloy’s recent cut to mental health funding, was matched by his enthusiasm for Connecticut’s stance on campaign finance reform.
“Billionaires and their Super PACs should not be able to control elections,” Sanders said.
He spoke about his plan for universal free tuition at public colleges, an idea Clinton has criticized as unworkable.
“When we talk about making public colleges tuition free, that s a revolutionary concept,” Sanders told the New Haven crowd, speaking as daylight turned to dusk and then dark. “There are kids here in New Haven … who are in the fourth grade, in the sixth grade, they do not believe in a million years that they will ever go to college because they come from poor or working-class families. Our job is to tell every child in this country that if you study hard, if you do your schoolwork well, then, regardless of the income of your family, you will be able to go to college. That is revolution.”
New Haven State Sen. Gary Winfield, who earlier in the day gave Sanders a tour of Dixwell, made the same pitch to the crowd in a speech at the rally: that getting money out of politics and lowering income inequality are the key to changing systems of racial and socioeconomic oppression in the U.S.
“It is his stance on campaign finance reform, the issue that changes our ability to move all of those other issues, that drove me to Bernie Sanders,” Winfield said. “You and I are not voiceless. We have voices. They’re just not being heard … We just don’t have the price or the ticket. That’s why this movement and Bernie Sanders are important. …
REM’s Stipe addresses crowd.
“Our system is corrupted because when you go to choose between their candidate, or their candidate. There’s a better way, and I know it because I’ve experienced it — because Connecticut has campaign finance reform. Because of that campaign finance reform, I was able to run against the New Haven machine and win. Not only did I win — but I was able to do some work that people didn’t think I would be able to do.”
Introducing Sanders, former REM band leader Michael Stipe stated that he was first drawn to Sanders for his outspoken criticism of the Iraq war, which he voted against in Congress. (Clinton voted to authorize the war.) Stipe said he has remained an avid Sanders supporter because his positions on racial equality, veterans’ rights, and LGBT rights “are consistent, common sense, compassionate and clear.”
“We are at the dawn of a different type of 21st century,” Stipe said. “Our actions as voters and citizens will form who we are to become, not only to ourselves, but to all Americans. We have the profound capacity to be the great country that we imagined, but to do that, we need a caring, tough and straight talking leader. There is a true revolution at hand, and it belongs to you.”
A Celebration
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Sanders fans from all over the state arrived hours to get into the rally.
In keeping with the haphazard quality of its campaign team in Connecticut, the Sanders team had not made it easy for the handicapped-accessible to get in, reported Pat Wallace, the city’s former elderly services director. She described the scene in a comment posted to an earlier New Haven Independent article:
“Walked to the Green about 4:30, wheeled to the security entrance with my husband in his wheelchair, was told to head back up through the crowd and angle back down to the corner of Temple and Elm to go to a wheelchair entrance. Did that, and arrived to find no way to get anywhere except stuck at a barricade. NHPD at first said they knew nothing about people in wheelchairs, his focus had to be on keeping everyone behind the barricades, and there was nothing to be done. He just walked away. Shortly other officers came walking by, and we called to them. One of them said to wheel back the way we had come to the main security entrance, he would see about getting us through the orange fencing somehow. I appreciated his interest in helping to solve our problem. It was far from clear how it was going to work, so we left. Clearly there was the intention to accommodate wheelchair users, but the Campaign and the City did not work this out. The officers did not have communication technology, which surprised me, so no one “higher up” could be easily consulted. Shouldn’t be this way on the New Haven Green for people with disabilities in 2016.”
In addition, the Sanders press team — which unlike the more professional Clinton operation has failed to get basic information about the Connecticut campaign to the press in recent weeks — attempted to bar reporters from interviewing members of the crowd, stating that “we just want them to be concentrating on Bernie,” despite it being well before the event’s 7 p.m. start. When press coordinators were reached for comment at the rally, they responded with the notice that the press, separated from the crowd in a media pen, was in fact free to speak with attendees, and that there had been a miscommunication.
The crowd in fact had a lot to say. Sunday night, New Haven was feeling the Bern.
3 Generations Of Millers Feel The Bern
Laura, Cathie, Sarah Miller and Mateo Cruz.
Three generations of Sarah Miller’s family were some of the first in line to see a presidential candidate rally thousands on the New Haven Green.
Miller brought her 11-month-old son Mateo at 11 a.m. to wait in line for Sen. Bernie Sanders, hours before he began his speech at 7 p.m. Cathie Miller, who lives in Westville, showed up around 4 p.m. to join her daughter.
She said she felt bad about skipping hundreds of people waiting behind her.
No, one woman reassured her. Sarah Miller had been waiting a long time. She deserved to go in.
“He slept for a long time,” Sarah Miller said of her son, who was playing ball with his five-year-old brother Pablo just before officials began to let the snaking line stream through the gate.
Sarah’s sister Laura Miller, who lives in Wooster Square, separated the boys when they began to fuss.
“I wanted to give them a front row seat to history,” Sarah Miller said. Sanders “changed the conversation” around politics, bringing attention to issues around climate change, pushing a single-payer health care system and “talking about the world we want for our kids,” she said.
She hadn’t paid attention to the campaign until February when Eric Garner’s daughter Erica appeared in a video supporting Bernie Sanders. Her father was killed by police who put him in a chokehold in July 2014, after he was arrested for illegally selling loose cigarettes in New York.
Her younger brother was cynical about politicians, but now is an avid Sanders fan, which made her pay attention.
The most important issue for Sarah Miller was campaign finance; Sanders has limiting campaign contributions from the wealthy and from corporations a hallmark of his quest for the presidency. Miller compared the discussion to one raised during the 2013 mayoral election in New Haven, in which candidate Justin Elicker participated in the Democracy Fund, a voluntary public-financing system. (Mayor Toni Harp did not participate, arguing that a candidate could use the Democracy Fund for the primary election and then take larger donations during the general election as independents.)
Cathie Miller, unlike her daughter, is a longtime Hillary Clinton supporter. But she too is also rooting for Sanders, she said. “Bernie’s a good addition. I probably will vote for Bernie. I also very actively support Hillary.”
Clinton is the best candidate on reproductive rights, important for Cathie, who is a nurse midwife.
“Hillary would vote for Bernie if she had the option,” Laura Miller added.
“Part of [Clinton] is happy” that Sanders has joined the race, Cathie Miller said.
High School Students Watch Democracy Up Close
Aliyya Swaby Photo
Romero, Sullivan.
Many New Haven public school students joined the masses on the Green. Board of Education student representative and Sound School senior Kimberly Sullivan waited with her friend Richard Romero, who is a 19-year-old Gateway Community College student and Hillhouse High School graduate.
The two were given wristbands and allowed to sit behind the podium during Sanders’ speech. Sullivan shook his hand after the rally was over.
Romero wants to go to the University of Connecticut after Gateway and is excited that Sanders wants to make public colleges and universities free. His family members are more interested in Clinton. He said he isn’t sure why.
Sullivan is heartened that Sanders is one of few politicians talking about how to regulate Wall Street’s powerful corporations. “He’s had the same goals for about 30 years,” she said. Her mother is rooting for Sanders; her grandmother wants Clinton to win.
Both are too young to have voted in the last election, but both will be able to vote for Sanders in the primary.
Gaston Neville.
Gaston Neville, who is 16 and a sophomore at Wilbur Cross High School, was working at the event, helping his father Sebastian Neville shoot footage for the Sanders campaign from the press section. Sebastian Neville did not know he was supposed to register as press, so they waited outside for the campaign volunteers to complete a background check.
Gaston said a few of his friends from Cross had come to the rally. Many Cross students are apathetic about politics; the ones who care are excited about Sanders, he said.
“I don’t know anyone who’s not a Bernie supporter,” he said. “Even though he’s not going to win.”
Sebastian has volunteered for the Sanders campaign this election, going door to door locally and manning phone banks. Usually, he said, he is critical of politicians. He is wary that Sanders’ stance on guns is not tough enough. Besides that, he agrees with Sanders’ politics.
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Kyisha Velazquez said she’s feeling the Bern for several reasons, but mostly because of Sanders stance on social justice issues.
Kyisha Velazquez, of New Haven Family Alliance, said Sanders is the only candidate who has convinced her he wants real “social change.” In the last two elections, President Barack Obama was the clear best candidate, she said. This year, “some people are more confused now,” with many candidates in both parties “pretending to be for change, but they’re not,” Velazquez said. “I don’t trust Hillary.”
She has been working to build a system of restorative justice in New Haven public schools, in which wrongdoers are encouraged to repair their relationships with their communities, instead of being suspended or forced out of the system. Sanders is the candidate that best represents that effort, with his proposed reforms to the criminal justice and prison systems.
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Cali feels the Bern.
Tom Breen contributed reporting.
I've lost a ton of respect for him over the past few weeks. Sorry, he is not all that we think he is. He is a shallow one note candidate. That Vatican trip showed his blatant ignorance of foreign policy and procedures.