Thomas Breen photo
Youth organizers at the front of Friday’s march.
The local youth who led the city’s 5,000-person march for racial justice came prepared — not just with songs, cheers, and posters, but also with specific, explicitly political demands for how to end police brutality.
Such a goal, they said, must be accomplished through “the complete abolition of policing as we know it.”
From the very start of Friday afternoon’s protest, New Haveners in their late teens and early 20s were in control and on the mic.
“As youth, we are not only the leaders of tomorrow, but the leaders of today,” said Jamila (pictured), one of the lead organizers with Citywide Youth Coalition, a youth advocacy and anti-violence group that co-organized Friday’s march with Black Lives Matter New Haven.
“As those leaders, it is important to know that we matter and that we have so much power to do revolutionary work today, and to do revolutionary work forever.”
Fellow Citywide Youth Coalition organizer Jeremy Cajigas burned a handful of sage beside her as Jamila stood in front of the flagpole on the Green and read the youth organizers’ eight demands to a crowd of thousands.
Those included switching $33 million of police department funding to schools and social needs; eliminating school resource officers (cops); “ending the triple occupation of New Haven” by Yale, Hamden, and New Haven police; and pulling $20 million from the city’s police pension budget and redirecting that money toward affordable housing. (Read about the full list of demands here.)
Jamila said that the youth leaders of Friday’s rally were not just standing in solidarity with anti-police brutality protesters who have filled the streets of cities around the country since George Floyd’s murder by a white Minneapolis police officer on Memorial Day.
“We are making it clear that we will push this city and this state to not only defund our police department, but to completely dismantle it.”
True to Jamila’s promise, nearly every one of the roughly 15 people who addressed the crowd over the course of the four-hour event was under 30 — and they all reinforced their stories of personal hurt and historical outrage with a political program for deconstructing law enforcement as it currently exists.
“We are here with simple demands for this city,” said Cajigas (pictured), the 20-year-old lead school organizer for Citywide Youth Coalition.
“We are asking for the disarmament of this police force. We are asking for the divestment of this police force. And lastly we are asking for the dismantling of this police force.”
They said that the youth organizers are fighting for “the complete abolition of policing as we know it, and we have to do this in order to reimagine a new New Haven without police in this city.”
Cajigas said the organizers are not interested in sitting down with city police for a conversation or photo opportunity. “We don’t do ‘cop-aganda’ around here,” they said. “Disinvest. Disarm. Dismantle. We want abolition.”
Benie N’sumbu (pictured), a recent Co-Op grad and an organizer with Students for Educational Justice, explained from the front steps of police headquarters at 1 Union Ave. why Friday’s rally was calling for police abolition, not reform.
“The American police force was never created to protect American citizens,” she said.
“It was created to protect the interest of the rich and to hunt, catch, and punish runaway slaves.”
She accused police of wreaking havoc in black and brown communities for far too much of this country’s history.
“Defund them now!” she called out. “We never needed the police. Put money into our communities. Give our schools money. Pay our teachers what they are worth!”
She said money currently spent on law enforcement could instead be spent on mental and physical health care.
“Defund the police now and then abolish them, because we don’t need them.”
New Haven native and recently minted social worker Simone Davis (pictured) added a bit of her own biography to flesh out some of the personal hurt and historical trauma that suffused Friday’s march.
She said that organizing with Citywide Youth Coalition opened her eyes to the “double life” she had been leading while in college at Southern Connecticut State University.
In one life, she attended class on campus and did her best to excel in school. In another, she came home and witnessed her “community being brutalized.”
At Citywide, she said, she began to understood “how systematically oppressed I was.”
“We shouldn’t have to fight for a right to survive in a country our ancestors built.”
Mellody Massquoi (pictured) agreed. “I am tired of being seen as a criminal everywhere I go,” she said.
“I am tired of going to school and being criminalized when I’m just trying to get an education.
“I am tired of seeing all my black friends work so hard and can’t get any opportunities because of this school system.”
Cowiya Arouna (pictured), a Citywide Youth Coalition organizer who is now a rising senior in college, located the source of much of that pain, frustration, and anger in this country’s long history of racist oppression — and the narrowness of such conceptions of blackness.
‘Four hundred years ago, the first slave was brought to this country,” she said. “And that’s where they want you to think our history started.
“But before that, we were kings and queens. We built our own civilizations. We built our own communities.”
She called out the European colonizers who “killed, raped, and stole us” from those lands. “And they want to call us savages?”
She called out insurance companies like Aetna and New York Live, which started out insuring slaves, and Wall Street, which profited off of trading bonds on slaves.
Greenwich remains one of the wealthiest towns in the country, she said. And Bridgeport, just a few miles away, remains one of the poorest. “Why is that?”
The divide exists in New Haven too, she said. Yale University has a $30 billion endowment. New Haven Public Schools has a multi-million dollar deficit.
“I want you to remember the beauty of our black skin and kinky hair,” she told the crowd. “Remember the wealth of our whole continent and within ourselves. Remember that they always needed us, but we never needed them.”
Charlie Delgado (pictured), an organizer with the local labor advocacy group New Haven Rising, applauded the march’s young leaders for bringing together and inspiring so many thousands of people in New Haven Friday.
He urged them to continue organizing and to broaden the scope of their demands to include “economic justice” — In particular, he said, putting pressure on Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital to hire more New Haveners.
“Imagine if all of us got together and was pushing it week in and week out,” he said. “Imagine how much further we could get.”
“Organizing is the way we escape from segregated water fountains and having to ride the back of the bus,” he continued. “Organizing is the only way I know to cause real change.
“Without economic justice, there can be no racial justice. And without organizing and building power, we don’t got nothing.”