“Tonight We Are All Parishioners Of Emmanuel”

At a packed church service, Mayor Toni Harp added her voice to a nationwide call to bring down the Confederate flag in South Carolina, and brought the challenge of tackling racism home to New Haven’s door.

Harp made her comments Tuesday night at the second New Haven vigil and prayer service in five days at an African Methodist Episcopal Church called in response to last week’s racially motivated massacre of nine men and women in a Charleston, S.C. AME church. Tuesday night’s vigil, organized by the local NAACP, was held at Bethel AME on Goffe Street, where hundreds of members of different faiths and denominations came together. (Click here to read about Friday night’s vigil at Varick AME.)

In addition to calling for the removal of the Confederate flag, Harp in her remarks Tuesday night received a standing ovation when she declared that we still need to have a conversation about racism, a subject sometimes as taboo in the Connecticut legislature where she used to serve as in the South.

“Racism has eaten away at the lives of people in this city, in this state and in this nation,” she said.

She spoke of the need to examine how racism factors here into disparities in unemployment, mass incarceration and health problems.

Dori Dumas, president of the Greater New Haven NAACP, echoed Harp’s words. Describing a continuing history of threats and hatred directed at the branch, she said racism is ​“alive and well” in New Haven.

“But, we will not be moved by that,” she said.

The service’s moderator, Rev. Brian Bellamy from the Friendship Baptist Church in New Haven, called the service a time for healing.

“We know why we are here tonight,” he said. ​“We are here because we have decided that we will not be divided … We are going to become closer than ever before in prayer.”

The massacre last week of the nine men and women of Christian faith during a bible study at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston has been described as racially motivated and a deliberate attack on the black community.

The service heard remarks from religious leaders across New Haven, not just Christian leaders. Rabbi Joshua Ratner spoke from the Jewish Community Relations Council of New Haven; Saladina Hasan spoke from the Ash-Shuraa Islamic Community.

“We are family,” Hasan said. When a family mourns, he said, it mourns together.

Rev. Orsella Cooper Hughes of Bethel AME described the church as still alive with faith, still a place of safety for the community. She urged her parishioners to stay strong and join with their neighbors in continuing the discussions that have arisen from the events in South Carolina.

“Tonight we are all parishioners of Emmanuel AME Church,” her colleague Bellamy said. ​“We are a lot closer [to them] than we realize.”

Bethel shares the same denomiational affiliation as Mother Emmanuel, with many of its own congregation holding its roots in the South Carolina city. Parishioners held hands in song, held and embraced each other in prayer and faced the shocking reality of last Wednesday’s events.

Rev. Steven Cousin, the pastor at the Goffe Street church, said the gathering of all faiths in a church hundreds of miles from Charleston is a demonstration that something meaningful will come from tragedy.

“We cannot allow one person to stop us from loving one another,” he said. ​“The power of God is love.”