Jackie Branyon, Taira Evans, Marsha Hurt got Trinity rocking.
In the midst of a heated re-election campaign, Mayor John DeStefano asked congregants in Dixwell and Newhallville to join him in a crusade — and he didn’t mention voting.
Instead, he asked them to join a quest to reform the public schools by helping to sign up kids for the “New Haven Promise” program guaranteeing paid college tuition for high-school graduates with B averages and 90 percent attendance records, and to join monthly neighborhood door-to-door canvasses to involve parents in the program. He called school reform the best way to help young people make it in the new economy.
“These are hard times. There are going to be hard times ahead,” DeStefano warned. “These are good kids [in the schools]. We do not have to accept things for the way they are. We have to do something.”
DeStefano made that pitch at three churches Sunday morning in the black community. And instead of collecting offerings, he brought along his own ushers to sign people up to “do something.”
He was taking care of two pieces of business at once: promoting change in the city’s schools, and trying to win himself a 10th two-year term in office.
His 90-minute pulpit pilgrimage, which drew a warm reception in a campaign season that has more often directed anger his way, reflected the importance of the black vote in the upcoming Sept. 13 Democratic primary. Black voters in New Haven are disproportionately registered as Democrats. Violence has hit the black community especially hard this year — 19 of 21 murder victims so far this year have been African-American. Especially with primaries brewing in three Dixwell and Newhallville wards, the black vote could prove crucial. And one of DeStefano’s top Democratic challengers, Clifton Graves, has a long connection with the black church; he grew up with the late Rev. Edwin Edmonds, the black community’s leading powerbroker and minister for decades, as a mentor and family friend. DeStefano has relied on strong support from African-American voters in his successful campaigns. (Graves is black, DeStefano white.)
The pilgrimage also reflected that while black churches remain a routine stop for office-seekers in New Haven (click here to read about U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon’s swing last fall), the turnout in the pews has winnowed and the dance has become less overt than in Edmonds’ day. Neither DeStefano nor his clerical hosts uttered the word “vote” from the pulpit Sunday morning. Or even “election.” Not that the context of the campaign could be missed.
Paul Bass Photo
Rev. Kimber (background), DeStefano (foreground).
The swing began at 10:30 a.m. in friendly territory: the First Calvary Baptist Church on Dixwell Avenue. The church’s leader, the Rev. Boise Kimber, has supported DeStefano since he first ran for mayor in 1989. (He won his first term in 1993.)
A banner stretched across one wall congratulated Kimber on his re-election this year as president of the Connecticut State Missionary Baptist Convention. Some 50 congregants listened and “amen”-ed as Kimber introduced DeStefano with a reference to the community’s crime concerns.
“We cannot blame anyone for the plight we are in,” Kimber said. “People say the mayor’s got to do something about the shooting and killing in our community. I beg to differ. Parents have got to take ownership of what transpires with our children.”
Click on the play arrow to the video at the top of the story to watch highlights of the church visits.
DeStefano took the First Calvary lectern to suggest what parents and the church community in general can do: Help kids do well in school from the beginning to get them ready to attend college. He spoke of how 50 years ago, the area’s biggest employer was “four blocks away”: the Winchester rifle plant. Those jobs are gone. The city’s newest top employer is also nearby, he noted: Yale. But the jobs there require more formal education.
In two weeks, the mayor noted, 21,000 kids will begin another school year in New Haven. “I can’t think of a better way to create wealth in this community or reduce violence in this community,” he said, “than to invest in these 21,000 children.”
The head of the Promise program, Emily Byrne, was sitting in a back pew as DeStefano spoke. She had forms ready at a table for congregants to fill out to volunteer for the canvasses and to bring to schoolkids to sign up for Promise. After concluding his brief remarks, DeStefano worked the crowd a bit, checked in with Byrne, then hopped in his Prius to head a few blocks south to Trinity Temple church at Dixwell and Henry Street.
Another Promise staffer, Betsy Yagla, awaited his arrival, with another table set up with forms. (A third staffer awaited him at the following stop as well.) Bishop Charles H. Brewer Jr. (pictured with DeStefano) was stationed ready to greet the mayor, too, at the foot of the podium.
Brewer has been greeting office-seekers at his church for 34 years. He’s now the “senior pastor”; his son, Charles H. III, conducts the services.
While some mechanics of ministerial endorsements may have changed over the years, Brewer said, pastors still have the ability to influence the vote — and they exert that influence.
Do they still come out and say, “Vote for” a candidate?
“You can’t say it exactly like that,” Brewer the elder responded. “You can say, ‘My opinion is the mayor does a tremendous job.’ My opinion will weigh heavily on the congregation.”
He made clear what that opinion is: “Mayor DeStefano does a tremendous job. All the schools going up around here. Despite the recession, we’re still standing in New Haven. That’s a credit to his leadership. I’m 100 percent for his re-election.”
He said all that in a conversation away from the podium. Meanwhile, a trio of harmonizing singers with a distinct early ‘70s gospel/soul vibe — Jackie Branyon, Taira Evans and Marsha Hurt (pictured at the top of the story) — got the 50 or so congregants clapping, swaying and calling “Hallelujah” backed by keyboards and drums as DeStefano sat besides the younger Pastor Brewer on the dais.
When it came time to speak, DeStefano picked up some of the energy from the music: “We’re knocking on doors!” to spread the Promise, he said, rapping on the lectern. He also made a point of saying he wouldn’t try to imitate the minister and offer a Baptist-style sermon. Rather he rolled out some statistics: College graduates make 80 percent more money than people with less education. New Haven public-school students posted a growth rate on standardized tests this year that was two and a half times above the state average.
(Left unspoken: The yawning achievement gap that still separates New Haven students from the state average. And the fact that the city students were starting from a far lower position. The gains were welcome news, but also quite small. For example, on the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT), district scores rose 1.8 percentage points in math; 3.5 points in reading; 3.9 points in writing; and 3.8 in science, which was more than the state, but not a huge amount more. On the Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT), the city still lags between 22 and 33 points behind the state average of kids scoring “at goal” on each of four subjects, math, reading, writing and science. On the CMT, city kids still stand 16.8 percentage points behind the state in math; 24.1 points behind in reading; and 18.1 points behind in writing. That’s all based on the percentage of kids scoring “proficient” on the tests. The use of school statistics mirrors DeStefano’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign, when he trumpeted statewide an alleged cut in New Haven’s drop-out rate in his tenure as mayor. He based that assertion using numbers that counted only those students who had dropped out only after making it to 12th grade; pressed on the point, his campaign noted that the state government used the same calculation in his statistics. But four years later, when he launched the city’s school reform drive, he reverted to a four-year calculation of the drop-out rate and declared it one of the long-term problems needing to be turned around.)
At the church, DeStefano credited the still-young school reform program, of which Promise is a central piece, for showing that New Haven kids “can learn if we work together.”
DeStefano’s description of the Promise program — especially the part about free state college or university tuition for all successful students — drew surprised applause; despite nearly a year of publicity, plenty of people still apparently don’t know about the main details.
“We want to make a promise” to the students, DeStefano said. “If you do the work, you’ll get a hand up. Not a hand out. A hand up.”
“All right!” a congregant called amid a smattering of applause.
“God gives us a choice,” DeStefano said. “We have to choose to take it.”
Usher Aaron Simmons welcomes DeStefano to New Hope Missionary Baptist Church.
By the time DeStefano was ushered into the cozy, bright confines and up to the microphone of New Hope Missionary Baptist Church on Newhallville’s Butler Street, the Winchester-to-Yale economy pitch included a few new flourishes.
“These are tough times in America. Tough times. The most important thing you can do is start people on a pathway to work. the ability to take care of themselves and their families,” he told the 50 or so congregants scattered among a dozen bisected pews in the narrow, high-ceilinged sanctuary rimmed with stained-glass windows.
“… The muscle you needed to work in Winchester’s was in your back and your arms. Go to Winchester’s now. See what’s there. Who’s our largest employer now? Yale. Yale. What’s the muscle you need now? It’s not in your arm or your back. It’s your brain.”
As at First Calvary, Promise was offered as the response to the number-one challenge facing him with black voters: frustration over violence. Before yielding the mic to DeStefano, New Hope’s Rev. John E. Cotton II (pictured) brought up the latest homicide, of 16-year-old Sean Reeves. Cotton said his son knew Reeves well.
“It’s amazing how people start judging because of crime,” Cotton said.
DeStefano repeated what he said at a Friday press conference at the police station, that Sean’s parents did everything right: They worked hard and “played by the rules.” Sean took part in the city’s Youth@Work program; he had basketball coaches who took an interest in him. (He was hit by a bullet fired into a crowd of young people engaged in a fight, believed to have started over a girl, at George and Day streets Wednesday night.) DeStefano said he can’t imagine what his parents must be feeling now.
Outside New Hope, DeStefano reflected on how his three church visits fit into his re-election campaign strategy.
Incumbent mayors generally campaign from office, ramping up the public appearances, using the perks of governing to get their message out. DeStefano has been doing that.
Their challengers tend to emphasize what’s going wrong with city government. The incumbents need to emphasize what’s going right while demonstrating they have plans to address people’s criticisms.
DeStefano argued that challengers also seek to stoke “anger,” which he called “dangerous” in a “community of such differences.” His goal in church, as mayor, as a candidate, he said, is to “give people something to be for and something they can do.”
Can the congregations (or maybe the pastors) spare some time for a sermon about the 1st amendment?