40 March For Harp, Target Enemies

Forty die-hard Toni Harp supporters rallied through Dixwell and Downtown to voice their enthusiasm for the incumbent mayor’s third-party run — and to rebuke a Democratic Party that the mayor said had ​“desert[ed]” her, ​“worked against” her, and no longer ​“represented the people.”

At the rally, a top Harp supporter criticized white women for allegedly acquiescing in a white male political assault on an African-American female mayor.

The march took place Saturday afternoon, starting in the parking lot behind the Elk’s Club at 87 Webster St. and culminating on the steps of City Hall.

It took place three days a mayoral election in which three-term incumbent Harp faces Democratic candidate Justin Elicker. Elicker defeated Harp 58 – 42 percent in the Sept. 10 Democratic primary; Harp is running Tuesday on the Working Families Party line.

Saturday’s march was organized by The People’s Campaign for Toni Harp, and led in large part by two of the mayor’s most vocal supporters, police accountability activist Emma Jones and civil rights attorney Alex Taubes (pictured with Harp). Harp and her allies disavowed the Democratic Party and embraced the lifelong Democrat’s newfound outsider status.

“For too long, the Democratic Party has taken many of us for granted,” Harp said to cheers as she greeted the several dozen supporters outside City Hall. ​“They said that they represented the people. But in this case, they have not.”

The march was also largely, explicitly about race: The city’s first black female mayor and a group of primarily black supporters criticizing her white opponents for unfairly smearing the mayor’s name over the course of the campaign.

One speaker in particular, Boise Kimber of Newhallville’s First Calvary Baptist Church, who recently wrote an op-ed in the New Haven Register warning of a white takeover of public life if Harp loses, said Saturday that Harp has been the victim of a #MeToo-style political assault by white men.

“No white liberal woman has come to this mayor’s rescue when white men have attacked her and her credibility and what she has stood for in this city,” he told the crowd assembled outside City Hall.

Harp suspended and then un-suspended her reelection campaign after losing the primary. Now, she said, she is ​“all in.”

Again and again, both on Saturday and in a Friday afternoon radio interview on WNHH’s ​“LoveBabz LoveTalk” program (see more below), Harp accused the leadership of New Haven’s Democratic Town Committee of conspiring to support Elicker even after she won the town convention’s endorsement in July and before high-profile local Democrats started flocking to Elicker after the primary blow-out.

“The Democratic convention selected me as their candidate and yet the leadership of the Democratic Party took their gravitas and their money elsewhere,” she said Saturday.

Vinnie Mauro, the chair of the city’s DTC, denied the mayor’s accusations in a written statement sent to the Independent Saturday afternoon.

“After all the accusations that have been levied against me and others in this city,” he wrote, ​“it might just be best for me to not comment or have to continuously deny each and every accusation as they serve no purpose and had no effect on the outcome of the primary or the covtention.

“I continue to have the utmost respect for Mayor Harp and the Office of the Mayor of the City of New Haven.”

Taubes told the Independent that Saturday’s rally was paid for by the Harp reelection campaign and not by the People’s Campaign political action committee, which he said has not been raising money for Harp but rather organizing volunteers on her behalf.

“One City! 1C”

Attendees waved printed-out portraits of the mayor as they marched in the sun down Dixwell Avenue to Elm Street to Church Street behind a police escort. Participants —and the mayor herself, in both remarks she gave Saturday afternoon as well as in a WNHH radio appearance on Friday (see more below) — consistently pointed the finger at a local Democratic Party leadership they felt betrayed by.

They shouted clapped and cheered and shouted ​“One City! 1C” at passerby, urging them to vote not for the Democratic nominee on Tuesday, but for the Working Families candidate two lines down the ballot.

“This Is A Race About Race”

“Party lines mean nothing for people,” Stetson Library branch manager Diane X. Brown (pictured) said as she recalled her late mother once told her that no voter should be absolutely loyal to either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.

“Maybe,” Brown continued about Harp’s third-party run, ​“she’s the beginning of that new path.”

She also said that this year’s mayoral contest has been about more than politics.

“This is not a political race,” she said. ​“This is a race about race.”

Local pastor Jose Champagne (pictured with Harp) celebrated Harp’s three terms in office by arguing that, in his three decades in New Haven, no mayor has done as much to reduce crime, protect and defend immigrants, and keep children in school and out of trouble.

In a speech he gave at the start of the rally behind the Elk’s Club, Champagne compared Harp’s uphill battle against the Democratic Party to win Tuesday’s election to the biblical underdog David’s rock-slinging conquest of the giant Goliath.

In a second speech he gave at the rally’s end outside City Hall, he compared Harp to Rosa Parks. Parks refused to give up her bus seat in a segregated Alabama society. Harp is fighting against giving up her mayoral seat to an unqualified Democratic Party-endorsed candidate, Champagne argued.

Hill Alder Dolores Colon (pictured), who is retiring after serving over 18 years on the Board of Alders, criticized local Democrats for ​“turning their back on her” just because her administration has not been perfect.

“Are we going to elect these Democratic backstabbers?” she asked the crowd. ​“We’ve got to get out there and keep bringing the people to their senses. They’ve been seduced by … I don’t know what, ​‘cause there ain’t nothing there.”

#MeToo

Rev. Boise Kimber (pictured) of Newhallville’s First Calvary Baptist Church, escalated his defense of Harp and accusations against the Democratic Party to another level when he claimed that Harp has been the victim of a #MeToo-style political assault by white male foes.

“The #MeToo movement was started by black women who felt disenfranchised and felt they had no hope of doors opening,” he said.

“The #MeToo movement was stolen by white liberal women who took the #MeToo movement and used the #MeToo movement to self-aggrandize themselves when it came to sexual orientation from men.”

And where have the ​“white liberal women” been when the Harp administration and campaign have been criticized? he asked. Nowhere, he declared.

When the mayor took the mic, she repeated the argument that she had been wronged by the Democratic Town Committee, by the Elicker campaign, and by party leadership more broadly.

“The truth of the matter is,” she said about her first six years in office, ​“for the first time, our neighborhoods were important. For the first time, we valued our kid’s lives, and we made sure that they live, that they go to school, and that they have a future.”

A democracy is supposed to represent the people, she said. But when she looks at the Democratic Party today, that’s not what she sees.

“I am so pleased that the people have decided to support my candidacy,” she said. ​“It means more to me than a party that will absolutely desert you when you’re doing the right thing.”

Click on the Facebook Live videos below to watch Saturday’s rally and speeches.

Middle Passage Invoked

Harp presented that same line of attack one day earlier, on Friday morning, during an interview on WNHH’s ​“LoveBabz LoveTalk” program.

Over the course of the 45-minute conversation with host Babz Rawls-Ivy, the mayor defended her six years in office, particularly the economic boom, reduction in crime, and creation of child safety-focused initiatives like YouthStat that have taken place under her watch.

“History will show that I’ve been an excellent mayor, and I’m proud of the work that I’ve done,” she said.

She lambasted Elicker, Mauro, and the entire ​“leadership of the Democratic Party” for allegedly conspiring to defeat her in the September primary. Just as she did on Saturday, she never mentioned Elicker, Mauro, or any other Democrats by name, referring to them instead by their roles.

“I got the convention nomination,” she said, ​“but the leadership of the Democratic Party absolutely worked against me.”

She claimed the city’s party leadership brought in ​“people from Hartford” before the primary to campaign for Elicker and against her. She lamented that the city’s party made it ​“tough for me to raise money across the state, and here.”

She accused the Elicker campaign of making unfair critiques of her administration’s lead paint policy enforcement and repeated court losses in mailers sent out in the run-up to the primary.

“The vote had been suppressed by all this smearing and negativity,” she claimed.

She also accused Mauro of never supporting her, even after she won the party’s endorsement at the town convention and before she lost the primary.

“Who does that?” she asked. ​“That’s the real question that Democrats ought to ask.”

She praised the People’s Campaign for inspiring her to continue trying to win the general election even after she lost the primary.

“People were so upset with the way in which my character was smeared by his campaign,” she said. ​“They [the People’s Campaign volunteers] convinced me that all of the people should have an opportunity to vote, not just the Democrats. Because the Democrats are really going away from where the population is in this town and away from where the values are.”

She said this campaign season has also got her thinking about the courage and resilience and hardship of Africans kidnapped into slavery and brought over 400 years ago to what would become the United States.

“I think about that Middle Passage,” she said. ​“And what it took to get here in the first place. All of the weakest people that were on the Middle Passage didn’t make it. So those of us who are here are strong, and we are staying.

“And we are going to make this a better place because if you don’t believe in American in the way that we believe in it, that it’s for everybody, if you’re Trumpian in that way that you think it’s just for some people, the upper middle class and the rich, we have something for you. Because we believe in the American ideal. And we believe that it’s not just for us. It’s for everybody.”

Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the full interview.