Why would a movie star come to New Haven, twice, to endorse a mayoral candidate?
Danny Glover can explain.
He explained it to an overflow crowd Monday night at Yale’s Afro-American Cultural Center on Park Street. Glover came there to endorse the candidacy of Henry Fernandez, one of four Democrats running for mayor in a Sept. 10 primary.
Here’s the short version of Glover’s explanation: Fernandez began as a student activist and went on to do great things. He cares a lot about public education. He cares a lot about cities. He knows “city government can work … when people mobilize.” Also, Glover “know[s] his amazing wife [Kica Matos] because we worked on death penalty cases” together.
For the full, uncut, three-minute version of Glover’s answer to a student asking him to explain his endorsement, click on the video above.
Glover (pictured) — the star of films like Lethal Weapon and The Color Purple, an international human-rights activist, and “one of the 10 best-known human beings on the planet,” as Fernandez described him Monday night — arrived in New Haven as the heated mayoral primary race enters its final, frenetic week. The visit demonstrated the emphasis candidates have put on attracting Yale student volunteers and voters, especially now that the academic year has begun. Click here to read about mayoral candidate Toni Harp’s Yale visit earlier in the day; and here about a recent campus visit by candidate Justin Elicker.
Glover’s visit also demonstrated the sense of momentum Fernandez’s camp said it has picked up as the campaign enters its final week following a live-televised debate last week and an endorsement from the New Haven Register. Only a sparse crowd turned out in Dixwell to hear Glover when he first came to New Haven to endorse Fernandez’s candidacy back on May 23. It was standing-room only at Monday night’s event at the Yale Afro-Am Center, with more than 100 people, most of them student age, in attendance.
In his remarks, Fernandez (pictured) appealed to the students’ idealism, couching his candidacy in the context of broader social change.
He urged them to see their “time here” at Yale and in New Haven as “the opportunity to change the world and see yourselves as the vehicle to change the world.”
“Has there ever been a struggle in America that did not start with young people?” Fernandez asked the crowd. “If we are going to change this city, if we are going to change cities in America, you have to be that change … You have to believe that change will never come if you don’t begin it.”
Fernandez then invoked the memory of the late civil-rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King.
“Dr. King led the Montgomery bus boycott when he was four or five years older than you,” Fernandez noted. “he was dead before he was 40” — and still managed to change the course of history.
Then he urged them to register to vote, if they hadn’t already; to vote, preferably for him, on Sept. 10; and to volunteer on the campaign.
Fernandez wore the black dress shoes, Glover the New Balance sneakers, Monday night.
Weak, very weak.