2 Months Later After Floyd’s Murder, Hamden Rally Keeps The Message Alive

Hamden mother Shana Jackson watched in horror as she saw Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of a suffocating George Floyd, one hand in his pocket. The policeman’s posture reminded her of the way a hunter stands over their dead prey.

She was so disturbed by the event and the many other police shootings that had recently occurred that she felt compelled to do something.

But as she marched alongside fellow Black Lives Matter protestors in Hartford in the days after Floyd’s death, fist in the air, chanting ​“No Justice No Peace”, she feared that this moment of nationwide reckoning would only be ephemeral. She said she did not want people to just go home, feeling exhausted and their energy expended, and not take further action for real political change.

That’s when Jackson got the idea to organize a rally that also had voter registration booths to encourage people to vote for politicians who support long-term systemic change to address racial injustice. Two months after Floyd’s murder, her dream came to fruition Saturday afternoon with an event in Hamden.

Braving the sweltering heat, over 80 people gathered at the steps of Town Hall to listen to speeches by Lt. Governor Susan Bysiewicz, State Rep. Robyn Porter, Rabbi Brian Immerman, Pastor Deidre Johnson, and other activists.

Two voter registration booths flanked the ornate semi-elliptical colonnade. Speakers called upon those present to fill out the census forms to ensure that the federal government recognize the racial diversity of Hamden and Connecticut and to vote for change. Local and state elected leaders including Justin Farmer, Hamden city councilman and State Senate hopeful, were also present.

“I’m so delighted that people across the state are realizing that your voice is only heard if you vote,” Lt. Gov. Bysiewicz told the Independent at the event. She said to those present, ​“The second thing that all of us can do is speak to our elected leaders about huge important issues like police accountability and transparency, like absentee ballot expansion for November and some things that would help with healthcare access and equality.”

Jackson, a Yale law school library staff member for 30 years, spoke with a booming voice into the microphone as the crowd, children holding their parents’ hands and elderly people in wheelchairs, cheered.

“We have an administration right now that claims to be pro-life but they’re not pro-life, they’re pro-death. We have people on the border right now that are locked up in cages,” said Jackson. Plastered on the stone columns and walls behind her were the names of dozens of African-Americans, Hispanics, and people of color who have been killed by the police.

Days after Floyd was killed, Jackson reached out to immigration rights organizer and social justice activist Kica Matos. Matos then contacted activist groups to put together the event. Jackson’s idea blossomed into a coalition that included Hamden Action Now, Black and Brown United in Action, Unidad Latina en Accion, and others.

“As a longtime activist, I know these moments do not last very long, so we need to seize the moment and push for radical change around eliminating systemic racism, around defunding the police and coming up with an entirely different vision of how police engage with our communities,” said Matos, who is the Vera Institute director of the Center on Immigration and Justice. ​“This is also an opportunity to create new Shana Jacksons in our community — a new crop of activists who feel compelled to act in the moment we are in.”

State Rep. Porter spoke a day after playing a key role in getting a police accountability bill passed through the State house. Among other measures, the bill. which now goes before the State Senate, would ban chokeholds and alter the longstanding doctrine of ​“qualified immunity” protecting police officers from lawsuits filed by civilians over excessive force. 

Bysiewicz said she hopes to see the bill passed next week, after which point it would go to the governor for his signature.

On the police accountability bill, Matos said, ​“It’s a step in the right direction. It’s exactly where we need to be headed. But we need to do more. It’s about also making sure that the laws don’t just pass at the state level but that we are engaging with the police in a different way.”

Matos suggested that governments should reallocate funds from ​“over-bloated police budgets” and reinvest them in social services for disenfranchised communities.

“Sick & Tired Of Being Sick & Tired”

Pastor Deidre Johnson said she ​“forgot she was black” when she became one of the few African-American homecoming queens at the predominantly white Rutgers University years ago as an undergraduate. Holding her gold-plated trophy of a woman standing confident and proud, she, too, felt confident and proud.

The she found out a group of white students walked out of the pageant after she won. The pageant, a multi-racial event organized by the African Student Congress, was cancelled the next year.

She recounted this incident during the rally and said, ​“We have to raise our voices to the degree that if we perish, we perish. No matter what we face, we have to raise our voices against injustice.”

As the afternoon wore on, Puerto Rican bomba music, provided by Connecticut-based cultural group Movimiento Cultural, filled the air. Then the beating drums died down and the dancers in their colourful dresses cleared the stage.

“Say their names with me,” said Farmer, as he listed the names of victims of police shootings and police-related deaths in Connecticut, including Jayson Negron, Corbin Cooper, Malik Jones, and Anthony ​“Chulo” Vega. The crowd echoed their names.

“These are the names of young men who have been lost by police violence here in our state of Connecticut … men who are younger than me, who did not get the chance to live to their full potential,” said Farmer, who describes himself as an ​“activist official.”

As he spoke about what it means to be an elected official in this day and age, Farmer said that he was, like the 20th-century civil rights activist Fanny Lou Hammer, ​“sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Even though the focus of the rally was police accountability, speakers emphasized that the problem of racism extends far beyond that issue. During the pandemic, Black and hispanic people have been more likely than white people to get infected by the coronavirus and die from it.

Three Quinnipiac University medical students spoke during the rally about ​“medical racism,” highlighting how black and brown people face more discrimination, more denial of treatment, and more dismissal of their pain than white people.

Whitney Nichols, a second-year medical student, explained how a common test used for measuring a patient’s kidney function is based on a flawed, historical assumption that black people have higher muscle mass on average than white people, and therefore better kidney function.

Black people automatically have points added to their score, which could ​“make results appear more normal than they might be,” possibly delaying needed treatment, said Nichols. ​“There is bias and racism in medicine in determining who can get a kidney.”

“Whether you are Black, white, mixed, Latinx, Asian, Native-American, straight, gay, bisexual, or transgender, we all need to care about each other,” said Nichols.

As the sun sank in the sky, the activists, the crowd flooded into in the intersection of Whitney Avenue and Dixwell Avenue. A woman with a loudhailer called upon everyone present to take a knee for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the duration of time that Officer Derek Chauvin held his knee on the neck of George Floyd.

About 30 people stood, feet firmly planted, fists raised in silence. If they could, they kneeled on the hot black tarmac.

“We’re not here to be destructive, but we will be heard,” said activist Los Fidel. Cars honked but eventually reversed and took turns down side roads when they realised the protestors were not moving. Some stayed.

Shadows grew long as the minutes ticked on. No one said a word. They didn’t need to.

Watch the event here.