Below-Radar Racial Realities Surface

When Helen Ward was moving to Hamden, she was deciding between two neighborhoods. Her real estate agent told her that Spring Glen is a ​“more desirable” area.

Ward was new to the town. She has since come to wonder about that comment — since Spring Glen is predominantly white, while Whitneyville is more racially balanced, especially its schools.

Ward, who is white, concluded that realtors need to be included in discussions about how to make Hamden’s neighborhoods less segregated.

“It’s compounding the issues we have in Hamden both with schools and living segregated lives,” she said of the homebuying process.

Ward brought up her story Tuesday evening at Hamden’s first Equity & Inclusivity Task Force Community Listening Session, the latest official response to a series of race-related controversies in town that have exposed deeper fault lines and unaddressed tensions.

After Ward spoke Tuesday night, other Hamden residents chimed in with similar stories of real estate agents leading clients to predominantly white or black neighborhoods based on their race. Some argued this could be a factor that divides communities, making Hamden diverse … but not necessarily inclusive.

The listening session was held at Hamden High School. Over 70 Hamden residents showed up to speak about personal experiences with inequality and exclusivity in town and calling for change.

Fourteen panel members— including Mayor Curt Leng, Greater New Haven NAACP Education Committee Chair Camille Cooper, Hamden Board of Education Equity Committee Chair M. Arturo Perez-Cabello, and Founder & President of Mother’s Demand Action Kim Washington — listened attentively, taking notes and occasionally offering information or personal experience for the two and a half hour long meeting.

Since its inaugural meeting in December, Hamden’s Legislative Council planned to create a community-relations committee in response to incidents this past year such as a Hamden officer-involved shooting of an unarmed couple in Newhallville back in April, and more recently, when Hamden resident Carmen Parker’s biracial daughter had been cast as a slave in a class play at West Woods Elementary School in January. 

“There have been too many incidents that have occurred in our town, that I don’t believe are reflective of what our town wants to be and what we can be.” Leng said the process for change through strong communication will be long, hard, and even uncomfortable. ​“If it’s a comfortable process, it’s not going to be a meaningful one.”

Throughout the session, residents took turns going up to a microphone before the panel to talk about Hamden’s strengths and flaws. Former Legislative Council member Lauren Garrett said she chose to raise her family in Hamden because of its diversity, but said that diversity is not well reflected in its workforce. Roughly ten more residents after Garrett spoke about the lack of diversity in Hamden’s workforce, particularly with the Hamden Fire Department, referencing its historically scarce female or person of color hires.

Many residents also expressed their disappointment in Hamden’s lack of diversity in cultural events and history in public school curricula.

Hamden Engineering Department GIS Coordinator Andrew Kinlock graduated from Hamden High School in 2007. In AP and honors classes each year, he recalled, he was only one of two or three students of color.

At Hamden High, Kinlock had now-retired teacher Leonora Henderson. Henderson was the second black teacher Kinlock had in his life. ​“She was one of the best teachers that this school system probably has had. She was able to point me in the direction of authors that I could identify with and could explain some of the things I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain at the time.”

Carmen Parker agreed that Hamden’s educational workforce and curriculums need to change. Parker told fellow residents at the meeting that on Valentine’s Day, her daughter came home from school with a letter to parents about the upcoming curriculum for language arts and social studies. She read a section of the letter outlining a curriculum studying the founding of the colonies, Native Americans, Africans, both free and enslaved, and women.

“Earlier in this manifesto to parents, it talks about how they’re going to be lumping the Holocaust in here, we’re going to throw some LGBTQ+ in here, we’re going to just put every vulnerable demographic in one unit and wrap it in a bow and send a letter home to parents and say we’re so fantastic, we’re committed to diversity,” Parker remarked.

“We have sent our children to school in Philadelphia, Delaware, South Carolina, and Georgia. This is special. Not in a good way.”

Parker called for love and mentorship to strengthen the diversity and capability of Hamden’s future workforce. ​“Firefighters, educators, policemen- we cannot recruit them because we have not fostered them. You need to work with what we’ve got already sitting in our classrooms. We can’t recruit better until we do better.”

Panel members promised to meet within the next 30 days with high school students about equity and inclusivity in order to understand their visions for change in Hamden as well.

To conclude the meeting, Mayor Leng told the group that for the past month he and Fire Chief Gary Merwede have been working on placing money in the town budget to incentivize training. ​“This would help Hamden kids that want to stay in Hamden and become firefighters and live in Hamden to do that,” he said.

Leng said he also plans to organize more conversations in smaller groups, and to break out task forces and committees into different focus areas such as hiring and real estate that residents were particularly passionate about. Although no specific plans were laid out, Leng said he plans to pick between two and four top issues regarding equity and inclusivity to focus on for the next few months and encouraged all residents to reach out to the panel members and representatives with ideas and input.