New Haven ​“Rises” To King’s Full Vision

On the day that slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 89 years old, hundreds of New Haveners gathered to celebrate his legacy of racial and economic justice, and to extend that legacy to the current fight for immigrant rights.

Over 400 New Haveners packed into the Varick Memorial AME Zion Church on Dixwell Avenue on Monday night to sing, dance and listen to a three-hour Martin Luther King Day service organized by the local labor advocacy group New Haven Rising.

A diverse crowd of older African American churchgoers, UNITE HERE union organizers, and local politicians filled the pews and balcony, with an overflow audience moving to the church’s basement to watch a livestream of the festivities happening upstairs.

The service also brought out a slew of Democrats with statewide electoral ambitions, including Bridgeport Mayor and gubernatorial candidate Joe Ganim, Stamford State Rep. and attorney general candidate William Tong, and gubernatorial candidate Ned Lamont, demonstrating the political pull that New Haven’s labor movement has for Democrats interested in being sent to Hartford in 2018.

But Monday night’s service was focused less on an embattled Connecticut election year and more on the racial, economic, social and immigration concerns raised by the President Trump administration.

“Today hateful, divisive forces threaten to take us backwards and undo the legacy of the civil rights movement,” said Varick pastor Kelcy Steele at the top of the service. ​“We cannot and will not stand by and allow that to happen.”

Mayor Toni Harp echoed Steele’s alarm, but also referenced the city’s 48th annual Love March and the West Haven Black Coalition’s 32nd annual MLK Day service as indicators of New Haven’s longstanding commitment to the compassion, social activism and resilience represented by Dr. King.

“We are here tonight to think about what it is that we still have to do,” she said. ​“We’re here tonight to say to those people who want to take us back to the 1950s that we’re not going back, but that we’re going forward together.”

As the night progressed, speaker after speaker took the stage to call for unity in opposition to what they saw as a culture of ignorance, hatred and exploitation emanating from the White House.

New Haven Rising chair Scott Marks and AFSCME Council 4 Executive Director Salvatore Luciano reminded the audience that King said that racial justice was impossible without economic justice. They said that working people of all backgrounds needed to band together to advocate for more good union jobs to counteract the ever-increasing disparity in this country between the haves and the have-nots.

“Dr. King was not killed because of his ​‘I Have a Dream’ speech,” Luciano told the crowd as he recounted the deaths of Memphis sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker due to faulty work equipment on Feb. 1, 1968, and King’s subsequent push to organize striking Memphis sanitation workers before his own death on April 4. ​“He was killed because he told black working people, white working people, yellow working people, brown working people to all come together to fight for economic justice.”

Luciano also said that Black Lives Matter, support for a $15 minimum wage, healthcare for all, and opposition to attacks on LGBTQ people were all parts of the same collective, social justice fight.

The middle section of the service was dedicated entirely to immigration rights.

Lucas Codognolla, the director of CT Students for a Dream, told the crowd that he was ​“undocumented, unafraid and here to stay.” He said that different segments of the political left had to remember that immigrants can also be black, queer, and poor, and that every one of them, documented or no, needs access to a good job.

Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA) volunteers Fatima Rojas and Vanesa Suarez praised New Haven’s status as a sanctuary city. They introduced Elsa Pinos, the wife of an Ecuadorian man who has found refuge at a downtown church for the past six weeks after being served with a deportation notice even though he had been living in Connecticut for 25 years, to talk about the suffering and confusion caused by seemingly arbitrary crackdowns on long-settled immigrants who have raised families and paid taxes for decades in the U.S.

And Donald Jean Marie, a Haitian immigrant who works for UNITE HERE Local 217 as a hotel union organizer in Stamford, spoke about the folly in repealing Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of Central American immigrants throughout the country. He said that sending 50,000 Haitians back to an island country that is still struggling to recover from an earthquake and two hurricanes would be a humanitarian disaster.

The keynote speaker, AME Bishop W. Darin Moore, built off of the themes of racial, economic and immigration injustice and the need for collaboration that had been preached by the men and women who spoke before him. He took those prevailing sentiments, and directed them squarely at President Trump, whom he said is ​“a leader who is antithetical to everything Christianity represents.”

In a wide-ranging sermon that cited Kierkegaard, Southern spirituals, the new tax bill, Nebuchadnezzar, and police violence against unarmed black civilians, Moore again and again decried Trump and his administration for fostering a political culture of fear, hostility and intimidation. He said that an effective resistance to the current administration included not just marching in the streets, but also singling out and celebrating a history of achievement among both White and Black Americans.

“If you celebrate Abraham Lincoln, then you ought to celebrate Frederick Douglass,” he said. ​“If you celebrate Emily Dickinson, then you ought to celebrate Maya Angelou. If you celebrate Ben Affleck, then you ought to celebrate Denzel Washington. If you celebrate JFK, then you ought to celebrate MLK.”

Click on the below videos to watch excerpts from Monday night’s service.