Thomas Breen Photo
Wanda Faison and Deacon Vincent Smith on the march.
Rodney Mitchell hoisted the American flag at the front of Sunday’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Love March, just as he has for the past decade and a half. His possible successor was right beside him.
Standing alongside him was his son Jayden, who held a simple yellow poster emblazoned with a white peace sign.
The pair joined 200 people in the 47th anniversary of the Love March, a New Haven tradition strengthened by the handing down of roles through the generations, beginning with the pulpit.
Mitchell withs son Jayden Thompson march at the front of the march.
“I grew up in the Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church,” Mitchell said, referring to the congregation on Lawrence Street where the march was founded and has remained rooted. “My grandfather was the pastor, and my uncle’s the pastor now. This is my family. They’ve always given me this responsibility of marching at the front of the parade, and maybe next year my son will carry this flag.”
Pride, tradition, peace, and resilience were the hallmark’s of this year’s parade, which saw around 200 people participate in the one-and-a-half mile march along Lawrence Street, Whitney Avenue, Humphrey Street, and State Street.
The Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church acted as the starting and finishing points for the march. In between, the church’s primarily black congregants walked alongside a diverse group of East Rock neighbors and civil rights allies, including Mayor Toni Harp, Connecticut U.S. Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut State Sen. Gary Winfield, State Rep. Robyn Porter, New Haven Public schools Superintendent Reggie Mayo, and new New Haven Fire Department Chief John Alston.
Black Lives Matter signs mixed with pictures of Barack Obama and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Brightly colored peace signs underscored the constant choruses of “We Shall Overcome” and “We Are Marching on Dr. King’s Birthday.”
Connecticut’s longest-standing celebration of the iconic civil rights leader, the Love March was founded by the Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church’s Rev. George W. Hampton Sr. in 1971, over a decade before President Ronald Reagan officially named Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a national holiday in 1983. For the past four and a half decades, the parade’s participants have proudly marched every year, rain or shine, on Jan. 15th, the actual day of Dr. King’s birth.
Despite the cold but clear weather and the lingering patches of snow and ice on the pavement, the marchers maintained that tradition this year by walking through the streets of East Rock for nearly an hour on Sunday, their flags and voices projecting their affirmation of the importance of marching on every Jan. 15.
Rev. Hampton Sr.
“I remember when Rev. Hampton once drove over to Lincoln Basset [School] to pick up a whole busload of students to bring them over to the parade,” Wanda Faison recalled. Faison, a lifelong Shiloh Missionary Baptist congregant who grew up in Newhallville in the early 1970s, marched towards the front of the pack on Sunday, helping Deacon Vincent Smith carry the banner that announced the name of the parade.
After the march had ended, the founder’s son and the current pastor of Shiloh Baptist Missionary Church, Rev. Kennedy Hampton Sr., led a nearly two-hour service that honored the tradition of the march while also pointing towards the persistent social, economic, and political challenges faced by New Haven’s African-American community in 2017.
Following a succession of speakers that included Mayor Harp, Black Lives Matter New Haven co-founder Lia Miller-Granger, Sen. Winfield, and New Haven Legal Assistance Association Executive Director Alexis Smith, Rev. Hampton closed with an impassioned and wide-ranging speech on the historical hypocricies of the Declaration of Independence to the continued threat that a weakened Voting Rights Act poses to African Americans’ basic civil rights. Again and again, he reflected on both his father’s achievements in establishing the march as well as on the continued relevance of the march well over a decade into the 21st century.
“Whenever my father was asked, ‘When will the Love March end:’” Hampton said, “he would respond, ‘It will end when the St. Patrick’s Day Parade ends.’ The march lived past him, and, I know, it will live long past me too.’”
