Allan Appel Photo
Sheeva Williams-Nelson and her son Joshua.
As the body of her 17-year-old nephew Travis Washington, Jr. grew cold, a victim of senseless gun violence last summer, Sheeva Williams-Nelson resolved to speak “life into his death.”
My Brother’s Keeper founder Barbara Fair and West Havener Grace Luysterborghs, whose son’s friend was stabbed to death.
She did that with one of many testimonials offered Sunday as 75 people, many of whom have lost children, siblings, and friends to street violence, gathered in front of the shuttered former Dixwell Community “Q” House in the late afternoon twilight.
The occasion was New Haven’s contribution to a national candlelight vigil on the one-year anniversary of the Tucson shootings, organized by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
Social justice activist Barbara Fair was the lead local organizer of the event, which also drew participants from Hartford and Bridgeport, including Bishop Patrice Smith. She runs a Hartford organization called Saving Our Kids from the Street.
Bishop Patrice Smith.
“I buried 50 kids,” she said.
“Gun violence is not a New Haven problem, or an urban problem. It’s an American problem,” declared Fair.
“I’m tired of mothers crying, of brothers and sisters without hope,” said Rev. Henry Brown of Mothers United Against Violence, another Hartford organization. He argued that hopelessness has led kids to gangs, and a vicious cycle continues.
He said that in his eight years in Hartford, he has been to 330 funerals. Brown called on all the organizations represented to have a concerted statewide march on the capitol on Good Friday. “We are tired of talking,” he said, echoing the sense of emergency and of crisis that pervaded the crowd.
Sharon Boyd James and Eugene Boyd.
As the evening grew colder, people seemed to huddle closer together and pay particular attention less to the charges of the preachers and more to the stories of people like Sharon Boyd James and Eugene Boyd.
“It’s not right for me to have to bury my child. My son should be here,” said Sharon Boyd James.
Jean-Claude Anthony James was killed in street violence on July 9, 2011, she said.
“I say to the new chief of police, ‘Do something,’”
Chief Dean Esserman, Mayor John DeStefano, and new Dixwell Alderwoman Jeanette Morrison were among those in attendance.
Although officials made brief supportive remarks, the focus of the participants was less on what better apprehension of guns and new community policing can do in the new year. The atmosphere was not somber but passionately inward-looking: What the community can do to help itself, including better parenting, more fathers involved with their kids, and alternatives to life on the streets.
New Organizations Responding
“I can’t talk to him. I have to write him letters and visit him in jail.”
Latoya Agnew and David White of the New Elm City Dream.
That’s how Latoya Agnew described the aftermath of a spray of gunfire from a car pulling up to her and her cousin and other kids as they walked near Lincoln-Bassett school last summer. Someone opened fire.
“My cousin got hit. The cops didn’t do anything, so he retaliated and got arrested. Now he’s in jail.”
Agnew’s response has been to create the Newhallville Rising Dream Team. It’s an offshoot of the New Elm City Dream. On Jan. 16, Martin Luther King Day, the group plans to hold its first event, another vigil in Newhallville.
Agnew, who is 19, thinks that beyond vigils, there need to be activities for kids in Newhallville. She called for the reopening of the Q House as well as to have a mini-version of the fun activities that the Q House used to offer New Haven kids.
That’s precisely what Sheeva Willilams-Nelson is dedicating herself to as well. A creator of Department of Children and Family Services work/learn programs, Williams-Nelson said she she has formed a new organization called Breakthru! and within it a subsidiary program for kids called Speak Life.
What distinguishes Speak Life is that it’s entirely kid or youth-run, she said. After initial meetings they told her what’s needed is not only the reopening of the Q House, but a whole array of new programs.
While the adults continue to figure out a way to get the venerable former community center open, the kids and Williams-Nelson gathered 300 signatures and petitioned the mayor.
Result: Not only a public meeting on Tuesday at the Wexler-Grant School to accelerate the Q House discussion, but also a new collaboration whereby Breakthru! and Speak Life will be working with the city to enhance programming at the nine public middle and high schools that are open evenings.
Williams-Nelson said that currently these schools, clustered as the Open Schools Initiative, don’t have programs that attract enough kids.