As Scot X Esdaile prepares to fly to L.A. to receive a lifetime achievement award on national TV, he hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to be the young turk crashing the gates inn New Haven.
Esdaile, Connecticut’s NAACP president, will make that flight to accept the “activist of the year” award on Feb. 26 at the 2022 NAACP Image Awards broadcast on BET.
The award recognizes Esdaile’s 35 years of work at the grassroots in New Haven and Connecticut, as well as on the national stage, pushing for jobs for the left behind, opportunities for young people, racial justice, better schools, and fairer policing.
Esdaile, who grew up in New Haven, has served as state NAACP president since 2004, and is also a national board member and criminal justice chair. He previously served seven years as New Haven’s NAACP president.
Before that, he founded an organization that challenged the civil rights establishment, called Elm City Nation. Then he and a crew of talented young New Haveners — including Roger Vann, Lisa Sullivan, Deidre Bailey, “Rev Kev” Houston — threw themselves into organizations like the NAACP and party politics to bring about real change, from community policing to new state laws.
Esdaile recalled that period during an interview about his award Thursday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”
He remembered storming an NAACP meeting, only to be challenged by an older leader to stop complaining and start getting involved to make change.
“I came in with my 40 – 50 people from the streets. I’ll never forget. He lived right in the middle of Newhallville, next to the Taurus and the Oasis. He stood up. He didn’t blink. He said, ‘You don’t like what you see? Stop running your mouth. Come up here and change it.” Esdaile took up the challenge.
Three decades later, Esdaile thought about that moment when he attended a Black Lives Matter rally in 2020 and saw younger organizers using social media to spontaneously steer a 1,000-strong crowd along a previously unplanned path to take over I‑95.
“They switched. They went a different route. I said, ‘What happened?’ They said, “Well on Twitter, they told us to go over to this street.’ I said, ‘Twitter? I’m not even on Twitter!’
“I knew there was a changing of the guard,” he said. “I had to embrace it. The way the elders embraced me.”
The next generation of leaders is “out there. They’re moving differently. They use social media,” he noted.
He enlisted the next generation of young activists when he started a hip-hop TV show he created and executive-produces, That Life. It is in its third season. Esdaile remains off camera as younger hosts and participants explore voting, health challenges, policing, and other challenges they’re facing. “I let young people do all the talking,” he said.
Esdaile isn’t done yet making his own moves on issues like jobs for ex-offenders.
“Reentry has become a hustle: training, training, training … and no jobs. People are profiting from our suffering,” he concluded several years ago. So he traveled to Maryland to learn about a successful effort to hire ex-offenders. Then he returned home to recreate it here on a larger scale. He has enlisted 27 state hospitals to commit to hiring ex-offenders under a “One Million Jobs” campaign; he is negotiating with other employers like CVS, Amazon, and Yale to participate as well.
As the first Black chairman of the Connecticut Boxing Commission, he has sought to broaden opportunities in the ring.
In recent years, Esdaile has traveled to cities like New Orleans and Chicago to help rival gang members settle beefs as part of his national NAACP role. “I learned those tactics in New Haven” working with gang members here, he said.
Along the way, he has watched the NAACP, historically a relatively conservative civil rights organization, open the door to new ideas, new forms of activism, new energy.
Click on the video at the top of this article to watch the full interview with state NAACP President and 2022 NAACP activist of the year Scot X. Esdaile on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”