Philly’s Finest Drill Team & Drum Corps at the 2015 parade.
A breakaway group has launched a spin-off of the Freddie Fixer group that stages the black community’s signature annual parade — with a battle brewing over this year’s event.
The dispute involves who will stage the 54th annual Freddie Fixer Parade this May 15.
Maurice Smith, a community activist who revived the Dixwell Avenue parade, is planning to run the event again this year as head of the official Freddie Fixer not-for-profit organization.
But Smith has found himself at odds with City Hall’s Harp administration, which has urged him to broaden his board, involve more of the community, and establish a realistic fundraising strategy to start meeting some of the $30,000 to $35,000 costs the city incurs through, largely, police overtime. City Youth Services Director Jason Bartlett, whom Mayor Toni Harp has appointed as her point person on the issue, said other organizations meet much or all of those costs; he said the administration is seeking to help Smith strength the organization.
Smith, who has balked at attending recent meetings with Bartlett, accused the Harp administration of trying to wrest control of the parade from him.
Meanwhile, a group of volunteers who had been working with Smith on the parade have formed a new organization called “Elm City Freddie Fixer Parade 2016.”
The group held an organization meeting last week at the Elks Club on Webster Street, then met with Bartlett about the parade. Dexter Jones, elected the group’s president, posted an announcement of the group on Facebook.
He told the Independent that the group intends to stage the parade with the help of a fiscal sponsor until it can obtain 501(c)3 not-for-profit status.
“If anybody wants to know what’s going on, who took place, they are more than welcome to come” to weekly meetings the group plans to hold at the Elks Club lodge each Wednesday starting at 6 p.m., Dexter said. “We’re hoping that Maurice comes.”
Maurice Smith at the 2015 parade.
Smith called the group illegitimate. He argued the group has no right to the “Freddie Fixer” name, and the organizers had no right to declare themselves officers. He threatened legal action.
“That meeting they held Wednesday was null and void. They’re just blowing hot air up their asses,” Smith said. “They’re not going to play me like that.”
Community leaders formed the event in 1954 as part parade, part community clean-up drive. It grew into a multi-state draw for black police, fire, drill squad and other organized groups, complete with weekend-long events. “Freddie Fixer” was created as a fictional street-sweeping symbol for the event.
Some accounts credit one of the founders, the late Dr. Frederick Frances Smith of the local Urban League, as being the inspiration for the character.
Dr. Smith’s niece, Maria Roman, has remained active in the parade. After reading in January in the Independent about the problems between the city and Maurice Smith, Roman said, she offered to help Smith recruit new supporters and raise money.
“Oh my goodness,” she recalled thinking. “We may lose the parade.”
Founder’s niece Maria Roman.
Smith told her she could serve as vice-president of the organization. She began attending meetings, consulting Bartlett and city small-business chief Jackie James, who is suggesting holding an African-American food-truck festival in the neighborhood to help raise money for the parade.
Roman and Smith began arguing over, among other issues, whether or how quickly she could obtain a full copy of the organization’s bylaws.
“My message to him was he didn’t own the parade. It shouldn’t be a one-man show The parade belongs to the community. No one person owns it. He’s had the parade on a deadlock,” Roman said. She ended up working with the new breakaway organization.
She said Smith is welcome to participate, but not as the president. “The community came together to keep a legacy alive,” she said. “It’s a staple of the African-American community in New Haven and the state of Connecticut.”
Smith said Roman was never formally voted in as vice-president of the legitimate parade organization. “These people are not even board members,” he said of the new group.
The group invited him to the organizational meeting last Wednesday. They didn’t hear back from him, organizers said. Smith said that just because they couldn’t connect with him by phone, that didn’t entitle them to proceed with holding an organizational meeting for a new group: “They can’t hold a meeting and say, ‘We vote you out!’”
The Nation Drill Team performs at last year’s parade.
City Hall’s Bartlett said he doesn’t expect the parade to come up with all the $30,000 or $35,000 the city spends this year, but that it needs to do better than the $0 it paid in the past. He said the city wants to see a “good-faith effort for this year” and a longer-range fundraising plan, with a broader swath of the community involved in the effort.
At this point it looks like the city might have to choose between the two groups when issuing permits and planning logistics.
Bartlett said he hopes it won’t come to that. “We’re hoping the two groups can work it out. The mayor said, ‘Give [Maurice Smith] another shot.’ We try to keep an open door.” Bartlett said that Smith originally helped plan last week’s City Hall planning meeting for the parade, then didn’t attend; the people who did attend, leaders of the new organization, were on the guest list Smith helped draw up, Bartlett said.
Jackie James attended last week’s Elks Club meeting. “Anybody can put on a parade if they have the money,” she said. “If they pull the permits and they have the money to cover it.”
She suggested that the two groups work together.
“I think there’s going to be a Kumbaya moment once everybody gets over their ego feelings and understands there’s a bigger picture,” James said. “It’s not about one individual. It’s about serving the community.
“The community wants a parade. It’s entitled to a parade.”