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Hip Hop Panel Charts A Path To Education, Liberation 1

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THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

Hip Hop Panel Charts A Path To Education, Liberation

by Lucy Gellman, Editor, the Arts Paper www.newhavenarts.org

Hip hop helped a group of Wilbur Cross High School seniors get to graduation.

When Professor Don Sawyer III looks at their flowing caps and gowns, he thinks about how many more students could heal with access to the poetry, philosophy, and lyrical swerve that defines the genre.

Sawyer is an associate professor of sociology and vice president for equity and inclusion at Quinnipiac University. Thursday night, he gathered with fellow educators, scholars, poets, and musicians on Zoom to discuss the intersection of hip hop, education, and activism through the arts. The talk coincided with the publication of HipHop and Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Hip Hop Studies and Activism), which Sawyer co-edited with Daniel White Hodge, Ahmad R. Washington and Anthony J. Nocella.

The discussion was co-sponsored by the film series Ignite the Light, Elm City Lit Fest, Best Video Film and Cultural Center, the Theta Epsilon Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., Spring Glen Church, and the Hamden Department of Arts and Culture.

“I was born and raised in Harlem, New York City, and so hip hop has been a part of my life since I can remember, and I often say that hip hop saved my life,” Sawyer said. “And so, in the work that I do with youth on campus and off campus, hip hop is the language and the culture that we exist in and that’s what we use to connect.”

Panelists included Rutgers University Professor Lauren Kelly; New Haven educator and former Future Project Dream Director Frank E. Brady; Hip Hop Association of Advancement and Education President and Co-Founder Dr. Tasha Iglesias; “The Sonnet Man” Devon Glover; and Three Rivers Community College professor and Hartford Poet Laureate Frederick DouglassKnowles II. Sawyer likened them to the Avengers, “a super team of people who are doing beautiful work.”

In just over an hour together, each made the case for why hip hop can be a transformative tool for both education and liberation. Iglesias noted that it begins and ends with the genre itself: hip hop was born through collaboration, experiment, and explosive joy during a sweltering summer in the Bronx. It’s official birthday is August 11, 1973—just months before some of Thursday’s panelists came into the world.

When she came to the medium, it was through breakdancing in college. She was moved by the community that she saw at jams.

“I realized that we were hugging, there were different generations, there was a lot of love,” she said. “It was a very different perception of hip hop than I had been taught through commercialism. So I used that energy and that passion of this culture to bring people together as an activist.”

Hip hop became a launchpad into her activism. She harnessed its power for voter registration drives. She kept going to jams.

While pursuing her doctorate years later,

she used hip hop as a tool for community building, working with 60 foster youth on campus. In her work with them, her research explored how hip hop’s history, lessons and practical applications translated to mitigating stress and building confidence.

She found that the more she shared about the history of hip hop culture, the more students saw themselves reflected in its rich legacy.

“They felt seen, they felt heard, and not only that—they were able to think beyond what people were telling them in the institution,” she said. “Most of them were saying ‘hey, you’re a foster youth, you should be happy you’re getting a bachelor’s degree.

That’s just great in and of itself.’ And I’m like: Think about graduate school! Think about the next step! What’s next? You have so much potential.”

Other panelists marvelled at hip hop’s ability to speak to the current moment across media and discipline. Brady, who worked at Wilbur Cross for eight years, said that he thinks of hip hop as a door to anthropology, sociology, and psychology, as well as to finance, literature, and poetry.

He recalled working with a student several years ago who “was called the n word through a racist encounter” with another student. It came around the same time that Cross students were planning Black History Month programming at the school.

The student wrote a rap that used the word, and proposed presenting it at an all-school assembly.

Initially, the school administration said it wasn’t possible to do the full rap. The student returned to them with a PowerPoint presentation and made his case a second time. He worked with leadership to figure out a way to introduce the piece as it had been written. When it came time for the assembly, the principal introduced the piece. “[He] did this amazing rap that really shifted the culture of the building for a little bit, because so many of the young people were listening to him,” Brady said. “And

I really think him taking ownership as an MC and as an educator … it really empowered his peers.”

Kelly, who is an assistant professor of urban social justice teacher education at Rutgers, pointed to the Hip Hop Youth Research and Activism (HHYRA) Conference that she and students have been organizing since 2019. When Covid-19 forced the conference online this year, students turned the space into a bi-monthly discussion series.

She focused on a recent session led by students Semaj Skillings and Naomi Filipiak.

The two talked about what it means to experience romantic and platonic love after almost 12 months of isolation.

She listened as students, some as young as high school, took a Saturday night on Zoom to talk to each other about the love that they had in their own lives—with friends, partners, families. They talked about couples they admired, including cousins, parents, and family members. They let themselves be vulnerable. They connected across the distance. Kelly saw the culture of hip hop working through the space.

“This work, it’s about what hip hop does to galvanize people and sort of bring us together,” she said. “And the work in the end isn’t about developing lyrics. It isn’t about rapping, necessarily. It’s about the community that we form through this sort of shared love and identity.”

Douglass-Knowles, who described himself as a “hip-hop baby” because he was born in Connecticut just weeks after DJ Kool Herc first created magic in the Bronx, has been using hip hop as a teaching tool for decades. Growing up in Norwich, Douglass-Knowles immersed himself in hip hop, thrilled every time he heard a new beat, saw a new video, or discovered a new artist.

“Just like—who are these cats and what are they doing?” he recalled. “And they look like me, and they talk like me, and they dress like me. When Run-DMC flipped the game—Grandmaster Flash and them, they was all dressing up like Bootsy Collins and

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so forth, Rick James style. And Run-DMC came through with the Adidas no shoelaces and … it became an anthem for me, growing up and so forth.”

His love for hip hop ultimately fed his interest in poetry, which led to an unexpected career in academia. Thursday, he took listeners back a few years to his courses at the Corrigan/Radgowski Correctional Center in Montville, where he was able to teach through a Second Chance Pell Grant. He had just performed his poem “HIP/HIV,” which ties tight bars with HIV and AIDS awareness, when he felt a thick, palpable sense of kinship in the room. By the time he finished, he could feel energy crackling through the space. He started a chant.

“When I tell you, we were just rocking,” he said. “You could just feel it resounding out the gymnasium and so forth. You could see the CO’s getting nervous—they were nervous, one was on his radio and so forth—and I kind of took advantage of that and took it to another level. And it just felt really, really good. And it felt, it was bittersweet, because it was so hard to leave those brothers after. It was so difficult. And it always stood out to me. I always carry that with me. And if it wasn’t for hip hop, that moment would have never occurred.”

Sawyer, who was born on hip hop’s third birthday, recalled growing up in Harlem soaked in the sound. At the time, “we didn’t even know what it was,” but he knew there was something singular about it. Years later, the practical applications of hip hop became part of his work as a sociologist.

The culture was his springboard for Hip Hop Heals, during which he worked with musician Clarens Descorias to use hip hop as a cultural bridge between Haitians and Dominicans. It’s also been an educational tool for him in New Haven, where much of his work happens outside of Quinnipiac’s quiet suburban campus.

Thursday, he pulled up a photo of four teenagers, smiling and soaked in sunlight.

He explained that the four had been part of

an experimental two-year program at Wilbur Cross, during which he and Brady used hip hop as a sort of cultural intervention.

The students “were seen as the school-skippers, the hall-walkers, and different things like that,” he said. Teachers and administrators looked to the program as a last resort.

The two “created this hip-hop space where students knew that they were seen, that they were heard, and that they mattered in that space,” he said. There wasn’t any extra-curricular tutoring as part of the program. The two never assigned extra work.

Instead, they used the fundamentals of hip hop culture to nurture a group of young people who the school had effectively given up on. Every student who stayed in the program graduated from high school.

“That was a transformative moment for me,” he said. “Seeing them walk across the stage on that day. Some of the people who other people wrote off … that was important to me. And we did that through use of hip hop culture in that space. The culture that’s demonized by a lot of adults was the culture that reached those students.”

Glover, who writes for Flocabulary and Shakespeare Behind Bars in addition to his work as the Sonnet Man, reflected on a similar experience he had a few years ago. At the time, he was teaching a series of workshops at Title I schools in Detroit, Mich.

At the beginning of the day, one of his students was quiet. Teachers had warned him beforehand that she might be withdrawn.

Instead of prodding—“as a teacher, I don’t like to force the issue,” he said—he encouraged class members to write introductions about themselves.

When she offered to read, she received a standing ovation. Glover’s students “made her the star of the day,” he recalled. Before leaving the school, he invited her to perform alongside him in an all-school assembly. She’s now a spoken word artist at the University of Michigan, and still sends Glover excerpts of her work.

“As teachers, we’re all artists,” he said.

“Every day that you do a lesson, that’s a script that you’re writing for your students to not only relay the message that you’re trying to leave for the end of the day, but it’s also a performance. Cause you gotta keep them interested. You gotta keep them locked in.”

A Language Of Possibility The conversation doubled as a powerful reminder that hip hop is often overlooked or dismissed as unworthy of academic, literary, or musicological praise—in no small part because it clashes with the white supremacy that undergirds the ivory tower.

Kelly remembered teaching a class in a high school, and realizing that the administration didn’t fully support its existence after only nine of 1200 potential students registered for it. Glover said that he often gets schools that insist on seeing his work beforehand, because they’re concerned that it includes crude or sexual language. In actuality, Shakespeare’s original text is much more vulgar than the work he presents.

Douglass-Knowles recalled a colleague Con’t on page

THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

Nathan Hale Teachers Bring Black History Month Home

by Lucy Gellman, Editor, The Arts Paper www.newhavenarts.org

Misty Copeland cannot stop dreaming about the ballet Coppélia. In class, she carefully learns the steps to embody the character Swanilda, who imitates a mechanical doll to fool her boyfriend Franz.

Out of class, the young dancer practices the steps until she can do them in her sleep. On the night of the performance, she pulls on her ballet slippers and whirls gracefully onto the stage. The curtain opens on the rest of her life.

Copeland’s story Bunheads has gained a local audience thanks to Briana Dawson, a dance and drama teacher at Nathan Hale School in the city’s East Shore neighborhood. This month, she is leading “Black History Month Daily Book,” a project dedicated to untold and under-told Black stories. After launching the initiative earlier this month, she and Principal Tara Cass have invited other teachers to lend their voices to the effort.

“We’ve been talking about a lot of figures in Black history that kids don’t know about,” Dawson said. “We have a lot of literature that’s beautiful, but we need to show all colors when we’re reading it. It warms my heart, because they’re learning.”

Each video takes readers into a different book, opening new worlds in the process. At the beginning of the month, Dawson started the series with Deborah Hopkinson and Don Tate’s Carter Reads The Newspaper, an illustrated story of Black History Month founder Carter G. Woodson. Fourth grade teacher Kevin Flanigan brought students I Am Perfectly Designed, an “ode to loving who you are, exactly as you are” by father-son duo Karamo and Jason “Rachel” Brown. Cass joined in with Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Baby, a book that she reads with her own children at home. She said the series has been a hit with her kids, who are two and seven.

“During Black History Month, it’s typical that we celebrate Black people and Black culture and Black excellence, but as a white woman, an Irish-American woman, I think it’s important that every day I choose anti-racism,” she said before reading Kendi’s book. “And that I raise anti-racist children and I lead an anti-racist school community.”

Other selections dip into the histories of Barack Obama, Ruby Bridges, Duke Ellington and Trombone Shorty. With Lupita Nyong’o Sulwe, Dawson added a lesson on colorism. With Matthew Cherry’s Hair Love, Spanish teacher Trudy Anderson taught students to love and respect natural hair. In the videos, some teachers go right into their books. Others are candid, with unexpected preamble and greetings to the students listening at home.

Dawson—or as she introduces herself, Ms. B—is a constant, calming presence on the page, which is run through the

online platform Padlet. She rocks t-shirts honoring Kamala Harris’ vice presidency, Black ballerinas, Jean-Michel Basquiat and quotes from Maxine Waters and Nelson Mandela. Early in the month, she looked to Bunheads to teach students the story of Misty Copeland, the first Black woman to become principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre (Arthur Mitchell became its first Black principal dancer in 1962; no Black women held that role until Copeland in 2015). More recently, she celebrated natural hair with Derrick Barnes’ Crown: An Ode To The Fresh Cut. “We have so many teachers now who are recording themselves and reading their books,” she said. “It’s also like a bedtime story.”

Cass said she was excited when Dawson proposed the idea earlier this year. The two have known each other since Dawson was a student at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, where Cass taught English before coming to Nathan Hale.

When she was still teaching there, she made sure that her literature students had a chance to read Black authors including James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison and others, “to make sure that they knew that it wasn’t just white men.”

Since coming to Nathan Hale eight years ago, she’s been working on building a culturally responsive staff and student body. Last February, the school marked Black History Month with an assembly.

Black History Month facts that crackled over the speaker each day. Dawson remembered it as feeling like a win for both students and faculty.

Then coronavirus hit New Haven, sending public schools online for almost 11 full months. A year later, elementary school students have just started to return to their classrooms in the midst of Covid-19 and a national reckoning around white supremacy. Dawson, who is considered a “specials” teacher, now comes into the school but still teaches her stu-

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dents remotely.

“One of our focuses is to make sure that we are celebrating Black history, Black people, and our Black population more often,” Cass said. “I’m making sure that I’m hiring more teachers of color. Last year, we had such an amazing celebration.

This year, I was like, ‘We can’t assemble.’

So how do we celebrate Black people and Black culture and Black history online?”

Dawson came to her with armfuls of books that she reads at home with her son A.J., who is a student at Nathan Hale. She and Cass did contact-free distribution to some of their colleagues, and encouraged fellow staff members to join in. Cass said that she sees it as part of creating a culturally inclusive curriculum and school— books that center Black characters are important for all kids to read. They’re important for parents, too.

For Dawson, the project has been both months and years in the making. Born and raised in New Haven, she attended Helene Grant School when Jeffie Frazier was the principal there. Students opened all-school assemblies with “Lift Every Voice and Sing” no matter what month it was. They held an annual “Who Am I?” day as part of Black History Month, during which students dressed as figures in Black history and gave presentations that reached beyond Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman. Dawson said it was only later than she realized her education had been much fuller than that of her peers at other schools.

At home, her mom also “made sure she went out of her way” to find books with characters of color. The first time Dawson read Debbie Allen’s Dancing In The Wings, which tells the story of a Black ballerina, she believed that Allen had written the book specifically about her.

Decades later, she is planning to pursue teaching certification through the American Ballet Theatre.

“I was like, ‘It’s me! I’m in a book!’” she recalled. “It helped me become who I am today.”

Now, she’s hoping to pass that on to her own students. She’s a fierce believer in the power of books: Dancing In The Wings inspired her to become a dancer at a time when Black women still had to paint their pointe shoes to match their skin tone. In the absence of field trips and inperson classes this year, she has streamed programming from the Shubert Theatre, including The Hip-Hop Nutcracker and Step Afrika!, to keep that momentum going with students. She said the daily book series is just one more part of that.

“This knowledge is important across the board,” she said. “Not just with Black students but with all students.”

Access Black History Month Daily Book here https://padlet.com/brianabellingerdawson/NathanHaleBlackHistoryMonth2021

THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

Two Musicians Mine The Moment

by Lucy Gellman, Editor, The Arts Paper www.newhavenarts.org

The guitar is a hammock, swinging over a carpet of gem-colored moss. Keys peel back slowly; it feels like the whole universe is waiting behind them, thick with stars. Ro Goodwyn’s vocals come in soft and sweet. They are deliberate, sliding in between the keys. It’s not clear who they’re speaking to, but there’s a feeling that it’s supposed to be that way.

“Something’s slightly off, yeah” they sing. “And I can’t explain the way it feels/ But all I know is/Something’s slightly off, yeah/And even if I had the words, they’re not for you right now.”

Thursday, Godwynn joined Salwa Abdussabur for Versus CT, an intimate listening party and celebration of Abdussabur’s EP Breath and Godwynn’s The Godwynn Experience Vol. II. Both artists dropped new work within a week of each other this month. It is Abdussabur’s inaugural EP after years of performing, writing, mentoring young poets, and organizing in New Haven. For Godwynn, the EP follows their 2019 The Godwynn Experience Vol. I. “I’m so excited for y’all to witness this collaboration of two infernos coming together,” Abdussabur said at the top of the evening, as 30 friends logged into Zoom.

They glowed behind the screen, dressed in all white with a swoosh of blue eyeshadow. Godwynn unmuted themselves, laughed and was suddenly on screen, sitting cross-legged and ready to talk.

In just 90 minutes, the event became a case study in how two artists can burst fully into bloom, and also support each other as they move through a world upended by the twin pandemics of Covid-19 and white supremacy. It was a musicological love fest, with banter that flowed from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Freddy Mercury to Pose to what a Black version of High School Musical might sound like. Abdussabur joked that their first vocal coach was a vacuum cleaner. Godwynn noted that they’d make a good house mother, with which dozens in the chat agreed.

Both works are deeply introspective, and pull in voices from the Black Lives Matter movement that range from protest footage to New Haven’s own Reverend Moriah Felder. Both bear witness to a specific moment, in a specific city, in this specific nation. But both also tell their own story, going deep rather than going long. Thursday, they fit together as stand-alone parts of a greater whole.

Thursday, Abdussabur explained that Breath was a kind of gift, recorded live earlier this year for Listen, Look: A Reconciliatory Journey Through Black Grief and Joy. The virtual installation came from curator Precious Musa and the Griot Museum of Black History in St. Louis, Missouri. It gave Abdussabur, who has been writing music for years, an opportunity to record and master the EP with local musicians Tyler Jenkins and Stephen Gritz

King.

The finished work is an invitation that doubles as a prayer. In Breath, Abdussabur brings a listener all the way in with “Open,” their voice undulating and raw at the edges. As the first notes swell over the track, Abdussabur’s vocals are almost conversational. Guitar plucks and strums insistently underneath. “Open/open me up/I’m ready,” they sing, and it’s enough to get a listener to focus entirely on the sound bath growing around them.

The song is a journey in itself, complete with a freestyled section in the middle.

Before reaching it, their voice breaks slowly on the words “I’m scared,” and Jenkins’ guitar responds, stuttering but certain. They wail, and so inject a kind of folk reclamation that sounds like a nod to

Paul Bryant Hudson’s “John.” Their voice climbs and dips, straining. It wanders, reaching for the next word until suddenly it’s there.

“I was super nervous about it, because I didn’t have a middle to it [the song],” they said Thursday. “When I do it in my room, talking to spirit, talking to the universe, I just freestyle it.”

Breath is also laced with deep grief. In “N”—so named because “I don’t want people saying the n word” when they talk about the song, Abdussabur said Thursday—they sing a cappella over themselves, their voice succinct and crystalline.

The word, repeated as if it is scripture, becomes a droning hum. It’s a lamentation, and also a love song and a plea. There’s a sense that the musician has looked into

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a wound they found in “Open,” and are starting to clean it in plain sight.

The piece taps into Abdussabur’s years as a spoken word artist, in which they’ve learned to say exactly what they mean.

“Fuck a knee/I want your neck,” they sing at one point, and the line is enough to slice a listener right in two. They push themselves forward, singing over audio that followed the murder of Stephon Clark in 2018. Clark was killed by police in his own backyard.

“That song is for my people,” they said Thursday as heart, star and weeping emojis filled the chat. “There’s continuous grieving. Even in this very seat, I have written songs because there’s no other way to … I’m in pain, bruh. I have a little bro. I have all brothers ... That song for me is special in that it came out so naturally. Yo, it felt like there’s no music for this shit.”

When the song flows right into a slowed cover of Leon Bridges’ “River,” the transition feels right, as if the two have always existed side by side. Abdussabur has pulled apart Bridges’ words, lifting each one up to see what is underneath. They have made the song entirely their own, with the architecture of a hymn. A chorus rises beneath them in wisps.

“We love loops in this house, we love the clarity,” Godwynn said in a sort of micro-feedback session.. “We appreciate ... do you know, I appreciate when people can take covers and make them smoothing completely different. The way it was dancing between the one and the flat seven, I was like, this is giving reggae vibes but this is also giving Gregorian vibes, but also, pose, pose, wow, wow, wow, wow.”

The EP ends with “What You Know,” a sort of pendant to “N” in which the musician faces down the very forces of oppression that are responsible for the previous three tracks. The work showcases their talent as a sharp-tongued lyricist: they drop rhetorical questions over minimal, just-fuzzy-enough chords that fray and split at the end. They do not flinch as they dress down a listener. They motion to two sides of history that the EP has marked so clearly. Breath gives the viewer a choice to be on the right one.

If Breath cracks grief open, then The Godwynn Experience, Vol. II does the same with a vulnerable spiral of selfdoubt. In the past 11 months, Godwynn has launched a small business, worked multiple jobs, started to talk openly about the value of rest and rejecting capitalism, and recorded an EP. And yet, the first words of their EP are a roadmap to the fact that something isn’t sitting right with them. That something is off, and they are about to sing through it. When they unpack it, they reveal a witty, tight lyricism that holds an existential weight.

As Godwynn sings, their voice is silk and spun sugar but also steel. They open a door to their own introspection that may Con’t on page

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THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

City Workers Go The Extra YARD, Distribute 1,200 Soul Meals

by COURTNEY LUCIANA New Haven I ndependent

Natalie Marshall, who has lived in the city for over a decade, said that life has been hard since even before the pandemic hit.

“Now I’m living on a fixed income, and that’s what’s making it a little difficult for me. I’m used to getting a paycheck every week,” said Marshall, a retire St. Raphael’s hospital worker. “But I think because of the pandemic, people have been needing more and there’s more food being given out.”

On Thursday, Marshall lined up with others in similar straits to receive a free soul food meal at the District 5 fire substation on Howard Avenue.

It was one of six locations where a crew from the New Haven Youth and Recreation Department (YARD) teamed up with city and Yale cops ConnCAT and to give away 1,200 meals in honor of Black History Month.

Each meal container included pre-made baked chicken, string beans, and rice.

Gwendolyn Busch Williams, director of New Haven YARD, said that her team decided on the idea of giving out soul food with the cuisine being connected to Black culture.

“You think of Sunday dinners when the family was coming together, and that’s a time for fellowship and love,” Williams said. “That was all in the cooking of the

New Haven Youth & Rec team on Thursday’s mission.

soul food.”

“YARD took the lead today to focus on Black History Month and to underscore the issues that communities of color are still facing including food insecurity,” Mayor Justin Elicker said.

Hill Alder Ron Hurt joined YARD in passing out bags. Hurt said that the Hill has a 30 percent food insecurity rate.

“Today is a good segue way into Black History Month, because this is how the Black family has done it,” Hurt said. “I’m from the South, and we all came together, and fed one another. We looked out for

each other.”

Martina Brown has been homeless for the past few months. Her only option was to stay with her mother from time to time until her mother passed away this month.

Brown said that she has called 211 to receive housing services. In the meantime, she has been relying on disability payments, showers at friends’ houses, and food giveaways to get by.

Brown picked up a meal with a smile so wide that her pain was disguised.

“People really do need the help,” Brown said. “The city really needs to have more

Photo Credit: Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen

New Haven High School Seniors going on to college or technical school, you are invited to apply for a scholarship.

To see if you qualify and to apply, go to www.newhavenscholarshipfund.org On the Scholarship Information tab, click on “How to Apply”

Stay connected to what’s happening in our region to address the impact of COVID-19 and to advance racial equity.

Did you know that…

• the New Haven Scholarship Fund is the oldest in New Haven • it was started over 60 yrs ago by a Hillhouse H.S. math teacher

Learn more at cfgnh.org/steppingforward

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Academy for nursing while also raising three young children as a single mom.

Latifa hasn’t been working during the pandemic, so she has relied on stimulus checks and her savings to survive.

She said that she doesn’t know how she’s made it this far.

“I was pregnant during the beginning of the pandemic so I haven’t been to school for a year. This is my first week back to school since,” Latifa said. “This meal helps me out because tonight I won’t have to cook for my kids.”

After the stops, YARD collaborated with alders and police officers to distribute unclaimed meals to food pantries and homeless shelters.

YARD made final rounds near Amistad High School. Employees knocked on the doors at Presidential Gardens directly across the street and asked if any of the residents were in need of a meal.

Jesse Polk, an employee of Abacus Heating & Cooling, was given a few meals by YARD for his team.

Polk said that with working directly in people’s homes, he has seen firsthand on how people in the community are living.

“I’m happy to see people stepping up for the community. I hate to say it. but there’s not much food to be seen sometimes,” Polk said. “It’s really hard to see because I’m a father of three myself. To have a small child tell you that they’re hungry — I can’t even imagine that as a parent.”

OPPORTUNITY + EQUITY

70 Audubon Street

of these food giveaways, and they need to build more shelters for the homeless.”

Mark Rosina said that he’s going through a hard time to survive while waiting for social security benefits. He expressed gratitude for the increase in meal giveaways during the pandemic. “This meal is going to let me put something in my stomach that I don’t have the money for. I’m coping day by day. Once I get the money from social security then I might be a little more stable.”

YARD Coordinator of Youth@Work Programs Tomi Veale (on far right in photo) said the goal was to give an average of 200 meals per site. She noted that their department has provided other giveaways.

“The idea is to always keep our families and youth at the forefront of what we do.

It’s a matter of thinking about the needs that we do have and to think about what we can provide as a department,” Veale said. “We’re going to always try and outdo what we’ve done previously.”

At the Wilmot Crossing stop, West Rock Alder Honda Smith joined YARD to hand out meals to passing cars and those who walked up to the site.

“This is my hood,” Smith said. “I’m proud of YARD. Things are getting a little better out here but the residents are still definitely in need.”

Latifa (who provided only her first name), 25, was one of the residents to walk up and grab a meal. She has been attending Stone

• since it started, we have given out over 8,600 scholarships

APPLICATION DEADLINE: March 15, 2021

cfgnh.org 2/9/21 1:00 PM

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CROWN Act Sails Through The State Senate THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

by Lucy Gellman, Editor, The Arts Paper www.newhavenarts.org

State Sen. Marilyn Moore was in nursery school the first time a teacher objected to her natural hair. This week—nearly seven decades later—she learned about a 19-year-old constituent who had been told to hide her locs under a hat, or lose her restaurant job.

Monday evening, Moore shared that story with colleagues as proposed CROWN Act legislation passed unanimously out of the Connecticut Senate. The bill, which passed 139-9 in the Connecticut House of Representatives last week, now moves to Gov. Ned Lamont. Lamont has been extremely supportive of the legislation and is expected to sign it into law.

“This is about more than being Black,” Moore said Monday. “This is about people who are in a dominant culture who want to keep people in a certain place. The real issue that’s brought to this point is the desire of oppressors to deny Black people, and Brown people, their culture.

The CROWN Act is a national legislative movement that stands for Creating A Respectful And Open World for Natural Hair. In Connecticut, the bill would add natural hairstyles to protected classes that are included in statewide anti-discrimination laws, as overseen by the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities. Those include locs, weaves, box braids, bantu knots, twists, afros, afro puffs, wigs, and head wraps.

Proposed by New Haven State Rep. Robyn Porter and Danbury State Sen. Julie Kushner, it recognizes that hair-based discrimination is often used as a proxy for anti-Blackness in schools and in the workplace. Connecticut will be the eighth state in the country to with CROWN Act legislation on the books; other states include California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, Washington and Colorado.

As of this year, CROWN Act legislation has also been proposed in 19 other states.

Read more about that here.

“This will be the first bill that we pass in this session that will be intentionally directed toward fighting racism. But I have to say, I hope it’s not the last,” Kushner said Monday. “I think particularly this year, this year where we as a country mourned after the murder of George Floyd. This year after we pledged to be better anti-racists. This year that we pledged to attack systemic racism. It is incredibly important that today, we pass the CROWN Act.” Monday evening, legislators brought a mix of personal stories, global history, and policy to the floor. Many looked to a 2019 study by Dove that concluded that Black women are 80 percent more likely than their white and non-Black colleagues to change their hair to conform to work-

place expectations, and 1.5 times more likely to be sent home or to know another Black woman who was sent home due to hair-based discrimination.

Moore, who represents Bridgeport, began her remarks with her own experience of hair discrimination, which started when she was just a child. When Moore was in nursery school, her teacher sent home an image of a Black child in the bathtub with a bone running through her hair. Moore, who was just a few years old, liked the teacher. She didn’t understand why her mother became furious, and then threw the photo in the trash.

She understood it a few years later, when a stylist tried to chemically straighten her hair. By then, Moore was in the eighth grade, and rocking tight curls that ultimately became “one of the baddest fros you ever want to see” by the 1960s. Her father had just passed away. Her mother objected again: the stylist could not put chemicals on her daughter’s hair. She didn’t know it then, but her mother was protecting both her scalp and her selfconfidence.

“Now little did I know that my mother was building me up all of this time, letting me know that you are fine just the way God made you,” she said. “Your hair is beautiful. Leave it alone. You don’t have to conform to anything else.”

Moore jumped ahead to her first years at the State Capitol, when she was a legislative aide to the late State Sen. Ed Gomes and starting to think about running for State Senate herself. A colleague, also a Black woman, asked her if she was going to straighten her hair. When Moore responded that she planned to keep it natural, the colleague called her brave.

She has had countless interactions like that, she said. Last year, a young woman that she mentors had a teacher touch her hair during class in the Trumbull Public Schools, and then deny that she had done anything wrong. This week, she heard about a 19-year-old constituent who risks losing her restaurant job if she doesn’t hide her locs. She traced a history of global hair discrimination, from the antiChinese Pigtail Ordinance of 1878 in San Francisco to European Jews who were shaved bald in concentration camps during the Second World War. At 72 years old, she said, she shouldn’t still be hearing these stories. Especially from women and girls who look like her.

She pointed to a recent New Haven Register op-ed by columnist Stacy Graham-Hunt, a journalist who is also the director of membership at the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. In the piece, Graham-Hunt argues that wide adoption of the term “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color), particularly among white institutions, has become the newest way of controlling the language and

State Rep. Robyn Porter

State Rep. Douglas Mccrory

perception of Blackness through a white, Eurocentric lens.

“That’s really the root of the problem,” Moore said. “Trying to erase the culture of people who were brought here who didn’t want to come, who were forced here, language taken away, families removed, and then when we seem to get to where we know who we are ... trying to take that away from us.”

“But when is hair just hair? Hair is never just hair,” she continued. “It’s culture. It’s pride. For me, it’s my crowning glory.

It’s the silver and the sparkle in my hair. I love it. I own it. I’m proud of it.”

Her colleagues brought similar stories to the floor. New Haven State Sen. Gary Winfield took legislators back to his own childhood in New York, where he and his sister were raised by their mother in the Bronx. His voice wavering, he remembered the smell of his sister’s hair burning as she tried to straighten it.

In the present, he wants to be able to tell his son and daughter, fraternal twins who turned three last month, that their hair is perfect just as it is. He is already dreading the day they face a comment from a

6

State Sen. Marilyn Moore

teacher, friend, colleague, or employer that refers to their natural hair as anything less than God-given.

“Right now, she runs through life with all of the energy that she has, with all of the beauty that she has, with her hair natural,” he said of his daughter, something catching in his throat as he spoke. “That’s who she is. What she will have to learn, whether she runs through this world with her natural hair or not, is that a part of her is not acceptable? That beautiful, energetic young lady will have to learn that a part of her is not acceptable.”

Still emotional, he walked colleagues through the time- and labor-intensive process of caring for natural hair. His daughter doesn’t yet have to go through wash day by herself. She hasn’t yet had to figure out what combination of masks, moisturizer, hair butter, and oil works best for her hair. But she will, he said—and he wants her to feel confident in that process.

“Other people get to wake up, get in the shower, wash their hair, walk out and be considered professional while my daughter is going to have to struggle with that and be told it’s not good enough,” he said.

“When there’s nothing wrong with that hair because it grows naturally out of her head like that.”

Hamden State Sen. Jorge Cabrera conjured a recent memory of his 8-year-old niece, who he described as “the daughter I never had.” Last summer, Cabrera and his wife offered to watch her for a few hours, so her parents could have some alone time. Just days before, a police officer had murdered George Floyd in broad daylight. Marches and protests were erupting across the country. They asked him to keep the television off.

Most of the day had been quiet. Then after dinner, his niece turned to him in their kitchen. Her eyes were wide and wet.

“And she said, why do people hate me?” he remembered. “And my wife and I just froze. And of course we hugged her, and we told her we loved her, and that she was beautiful, and that she mattered, and we affirmed her in every way possible. That’s the message we’re sending here tonight, ladies and gentlemen, This bill is not just good law. It sends a strong message to all the little girls, like my niece, and boys, that they matter, that they’ve valued, that they’re loved, no matter what they look like.”

Toward the end of the debate, Hartford, Bloomfield and Windsor State. Sen Douglas McCrory looked back to the 1940s, when psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark first performed “The Doll Test.” In the test, conducted over several states, the Clarks lined up four dolls in order of skin tone, from white to black. Then they asked children to identify which doll was preferable and which was ugly.

Overwhelmingly, Black children chose the white doll as preferable, and the Black dolls as ugly. The experiment, one of the first to show hard data on American racism and internalized anti-Blackness in children, became pivotal in arguments for Brown v. Board of Education and desegregating American schools.

In 2010, psychologist Margaret Beale Spencer repeated the study for CNN, working with 133 children across eight schools. Four of the schools were in Georgia; four were in the New York metro area. Over 50 years and multiple U.S. Supreme Court cases later, test concluded the same bias toward lighter skin.

“This is cultural conditioning that was taking place for little Black girls and Black people in general,” McCrory said.

“That your standard of beauty didn’t exist. And your standard of beauty isn’t beautiful. And we struggle with that.”

He urged colleagues to vote yes on the bill. Moments later, a tally showed 33 votes in the affirmative. No one voted against the legislation.

“We’re gonna let our queens wear their crowns without prejudice,” he said.

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THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

The Fight to End Solitary in Connecticut Isn’t Over; Closing Northern was Just a First Step.

By the Steering Committee of Stop Solitary CT— Rev. Allie Perry, Ann Massaro, Barbara Fair, Bob Gillis, James Tillman, Joseph Gaylin, Leighton Johnson, Kevnesha Boyd, and Rahisha Bivens (photo credit: Raheem Nelson) On Monday, Governor Lamont announced a long-awaited and hard-fought victory for activists: the horrific supermax prison, Northern Correctional Institution, will close this year. The announcement came less than a week after the Connecticut Department of Correction was sued for the physical and psychological abuse of people with mental illness incarcerated at the facility. The lawsuit was the latest milestone in a decades-long campaign against the supermax, where life is defined by social isolation and sensory deprivation. We celebrate an end, at long last, to the torture inflicted inside those walls. But we know that the fight to protect all incarcerated people in Connecticut is far from over.

Northern, as detailed in last week’s lawsuit, is the site of some of the most severe abuses in the state’s prison system. Prisoners are caged in concrete boxes for 22 or more hours per day. When they decompensate––experiencing self-injury, smearing feces around their cells, even attempting to die by suicide––they can be met with physical violence and left chained in painful, heavy shackles for days at a time.

Kezlyn Méndez, whose story is included in the lawsuit, talks about being shackled for 72 hours straight in chains so restrictive he couldn’t wipe himself after using the bathroom. We welcome the knowledge that, one day soon, no one else will be tortured like that at Northern.

But closing Northern is not the end of the road. Solitary confinement is not a place,

it’s a state of being, and we need to make sure no human being is subjected to the extreme isolation and abusive shackling that occurs throughout the Connecticut prison system.

We also need a better way to address the injustices we’ve known are happening in the DOC for decades. Northern has been the subject of multiple lawsuits over the years, in addition to the case filed last week. Activists, including our coalition at Stop Solitary CT, have long been calling attention to the torture happening behind Connecticut prison walls––both at Northern and throughout the system. The practices are so extreme that even the United

Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has condemned Connecticut specifically for its abusive policies.

But despite pressure ranging from the local to the international level, the Department of Correction has repeatedly failed to make the changes we need to protect incarcerated people. They have continued to lock people in isolated confinement, despite knowing the severe harm it causes. They have continued to shackle people in dirty, freezing cells for days, without any reasonable safety justification. And as we have seen from their use of isolated confinement and Northern to cope with COVID-19, they respond to the

unexpected with their harshest tools. The latest lawsuit underscores what we have long known: the level of opacity our State has offered the DOC leaves incarcerated people vulnerable to violence and torture.

It should not have taken this long to shut down Northern, and we should not still be fighting to make sure the same abuses are not inflicted at other prisons. We desperately need oversight in the state’s prison system.

It’s time for the legislature to take action to protect incarcerated people. This session, they must pass the PROTECT Act. The PROTECT Act would, among other measures, end solitary confinement, abolish the in-cell shackling practices described in last week’s lawsuit, codify Northern’s closure, and implement an oversight system to make sure that it doesn’t take decades of advocacy and litigation to keep our incarcerated community members safe. Passing this comprehensive legislation would prevent the extreme physical and mental harm that is routinely inflicted on prisoners. Instead of leaving returning citizens with the trauma, the PROTECT Act would keep our communities connected, safe, and whole.

The past week has seen multiple important milestones in the campaign to end solitary in Connecticut. But the fight isn’t over until the legislature passes codifies change in legislation and allocates funding to protect the lives of incarcerated people. We need system-wide change. We need the PROTECT Act. Rev. Allie Perry, Ann Massaro, Barbara Fair, Bob Gillis, James Tillman, Joseph Gaylin, Leighton Johnson, Kevnesha Boyd, and Rahisha Bivens (photo credit:Raheem Nelson)

Clemente Community Honors Johnny Dye

by STAFF

New Haven I ndependent

Clemente Leadership Academy capped off Black History Month with a living example of New Haven’s Black history, Johnny Dye. Dye, an 80-year-old Pratt & Whitney retiree, has been a leading grassroots voice in the Hill neighborhood for decades. He has led a ward committee, a management team, a block watch, and generally represented the voice of his neighbors in the crafting of public decisions affecting their lives.

He has earned many awards along the way. Friday he earned his latest: Clemente’s Black History Leadership Award.

Hill police officers, for whom he is an invaluable neighborhood partner, helped escort Dye to the school for the ceremony, which included dance, song and poetry..

Dye spoke with students in the classroom as well as online. So did Principal Mia Duff.

CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Principal Mia Duff with Johnny Dye at Friday’s Black History Month ceremony.

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Con’t from page

Liberation

who had been promoted to department head, and advised him to create a curriculum around hip hop for his classes. When he did, she told him he couldn’t teach it in the department. He had to seek out the support of university leadership before the class was approved. He understood that she had made the offer halfheartedly, and didn’t consider hip hop part of the literary canon.

“I feel like there’s a lot of people out there who are missing the opportunity to bridge this cultural language, he said. “It’s been here for 40 years. We’re not going anywhere. And we’re not going to allow you to silence us. No matter how many times we fall, we’re gonna get back up.”

Iglesias agreed, suggesting that the biggest obstacle may come from academia and higher education itself. In her experience, it’s often her academic colleagues and supervisors who are most skeptical of the genre’s place in the academy and in the classroom.

“People that are not familiar with the culture have only been shown through the deficit lens,” she said. “So a lot of what our work is, and a lot of what we have to do sometimes, is help people unlearn. And reeducate them and share the culture.”

Brady added that he also sees misinformation coming from mainstream news and media outlets that depict hip hop as violent and intimately tied to crime. In his work, he tries to bust through those stereotypes and allow students to create organically. Sawyer nodded knowingly, his eyes wide underneath the broad brim of a Yankees cap.

“Sometimes our youth are looked at through the lens of deficits, as if it’s their own fault, right, for the reasons that they are marginalized and the experiences that they are having,” he said, noting the work of scholar Garrett Albert Duncan. “What hip hop helps us do is to see our students through the lens of possibility.”

He recalled speaking at Quinnipiac’s freshman orientation a few years ago, with an address built around Drake’s lyrics “started from the bottom, now we’re here.” Nodding to Drake’s role as a poet and philosopher, he knitted it to students’ own journey to college and their charge for the next four years of their lives. Students got it, he remembered.

But when he came down from the stage, colleagues congratulated him as if he’d just given a performance instead of an academic address. Some of them congratulated him on “rapping,” rippling their shoulders as they spoke. His thoughts went to comedian Dave Chappelle, who once talked about hearing a laugh “that wasn’t laughing with him.”

“I was like, ‘I did not rap one bit while I was up there,’” he said. “I told a story to the students. And so sometimes when you do this work, I think people get so caught up in the delivery that it’s almost like they either forget or ignore that we have substance to the work that we are doing.”

Hip-Hop and Dismantling the School-toPrison Pipeline (Hip Hop Studies and Activism)is available here https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/62345?format=HC

THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

Whalley Brainstorms On $5.5M Safety Fix

by MAYA MCFADDEN

New Haven I ndependent

New Haven’s oldest Black church, Varick Memorial AME Zion Church, partnered with the Health Department to offer 51 vaccinations Wednesday at the city’s 12th popup clinic aimed at protecting communities of color from Covid-19.

Varick Pastor Kelcy Steele opened the church’s doors to the public to help make vaccination distribution accessible and equitable. Many people said they felt more secure getting vaccinated at a place of worship like Varick, Steele said.

“This is a safe place, and many came because they felt most comfortable inside a church,” Steele said.

So far the city has administered 7,351 vaccinations, including 5,555 first doses.

(That’s separate from the vaccinations administered by Yale New Haven Health, Hill and Fair Haven Health centers, or nursing homes), With these Wednesday pop-up events the city has gone out into the community to reach people who otherwise might not get the vaccine.“It’s very important for us to ensure that we provide the communities that historically have not had access to health care the opportunity to get vaccinated,” Mayor Justin Elicker said.

In coming weeks Varick will partner with Cornell Scott-Hill Health to offer an additional space for its weekly vaccination clinic, Steele said.

West Rock/West Hills Alder Honda Smith said she was skeptical about the vaccination when it first rolled out.

“Now I’ve got the courage because I want

to live,” she said. “I was tired of sitting at home in fear.”

Smith recorded the ten-minute process of registering for the vaccination then getting the shot on Facebook Live to urge the community to follow in her footsteps.

Christopher Blazejovsky, 32, who lives in a New Haven sober house, heard from the home’s owner that he was eligible to get vaccinated.

Blazejovsky went through drug and alcohol treatment in Florida and recently was moved to New Haven. The pandemic has caused for his recovery journey to be more difficult because of a lack of family time, he said. “It’s been tough with staying sober when you can’t do much to stay busy.”

His treatment meetings have been switched to a virtual platform. “You don’t have the security of hugging or shaking hands” Blazejovsky said.

After getting vaccinated, Blazejovsky said he hopes to visit his family more often.

Dixwell/Prospect Hill Alder Steve Winter said the city must expedite its strategy to open vaccination sites in neighborhoods the way it expanded Covid testing in the summer.

“We need to ramp up access to vaccinations in the community so that our Black and brown residents are well served,” Winter said.

Sharon Willard, 71, got vaccinated Wednesday as a staff member at Community Action of New Haven.

“I know others are hesitant, so I figured I ought to get it,” she said. Willard said she called into the Health Department last week

THOMAS BREEN PRE-PANDEMIC PHOTOWASSD President Allen McCollum (right), with City Traffic Engineer Bijan Notghi on 2020 walk: It’s dark.

and within five minutes was offered her Wednesday appointment.

Charles Moye, 73, couldn’t get vaccinated at his local CVS in Seymour because they hadn’t received their shipment. He called the New Haven Health Department Tuesday and got scheduled for a Wednesday appointment.

Moye was urged by his son to get vaccinated because his underlying health issues put him at risk if he gets Covid. Since the start of the pandemic, Moye has been

!

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avoiding visiting he hospital as much as possible. “I’m still not sure what’s in it and all of its effects. because they don’t tell you that stuff. But I don’t want to run out of time when they run out,” he said of the vaccine.

While in nursing school, Moye visited a hospital and saw a patient suffering from a severe case of the flu struggling to use a ventilator. Moye recalled thinking to himself: “I don’t want to die like that.” So he got the vaccination.

Since the start of the pandemic Annette Moore-Powell, 67, has been only to church and the grocery store. Moore-Powell, who lives in North Haven, got vaccinated after her daughter, who lives in New Haven, told her about the Varick pop-up site. “It was nice here. A church definitely makes it feel more safe,” she said.

Moore-Powell was motivated to get vaccinated by her nephew, who caught Covid recently. “The way he explained it to me is like nothing you want to get,” she said of Covid-19. She also has a niece who got sick from Covid.

Despite being worried about the potential side effects of the vaccination, she got her first dose of the vaccine Wednesday and left with a scheduled appointment to get her second dose in March.

Whiling bringing his mom to get vaccinated, James Carr noticed the registration sheet said first responders are eligible to get the shot. As a fire inspector for Yale University, Carr didn’t hesitate to register himself as well Wednesday. “It’s a no-brainer,” he said.

The pandemic has increased Carr’s workload at the department. Not only has work caused him stress, he said, but some of his friends have passed away after catching Covid.

“I want to avoid passing it along to my mom and the community,” he said.

All community members who got vaccinated Wednesday left with a scheduled followup appointment to get their second dose at Varick on March 24.

THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

Genevive Walker Ascends To Lead ConnCAT

by STAFF

New Haven I ndependent

Genevive Walker is taking command of one of New Haven’s leading youth and workforce development nonprofits, the Connecticut Center for Arts and Technology (ConnCAT).

Walker, who has worked at ConnCAT since 2012, most recently served as the chief operating officer. The board announced Tuesday that she is now the president and CEO. ConnCAT has earned a reputation for successful training programs that turn unemployed and underemployed New Haveners into chefs and phlebotomists.

It also runs cultural and educational programs for young people.

She succeeds Erik Clemons as the ConnCAT CEO. But Clemons remains very much in the mix: He will now concentrate on what was the second half of his job, building up a related economic development organization called ConnCORP that is helping to lead the revival of Dixwell and other city neighborhoods.

ConnCORP is in the midst of transforming Dixwell Plaza into a $200 million mixed-use housing, commercial and cultural mecca. Clemons, with the title of ConnCORP executive chairman, will continue guiding that project along with ConnCORP President Paul McCraven.

They will also continue crafting efforts like a new small-business incubator called the Community Economic Impact Lab and a cloud kitchen called Monterey Kitchen.

Connecticut Center for Arts and Technology (ConnCAT) Board of Directors today announced Genevive Walker as the new President & CEO to lead the organization into its next phase of community innovation. Founding President & CEO, Erik Clemons has been named Executive Chairman of ConnCORP, the economic development arm of ConnCAT, and is poised to lead the organization’s broadened and deepened programs and initiatives. Both appointments become effective March 1, 2021.

The changes reflect ConnCORP’s strategic shift to become a 501(c)3 organization and cement its strategic growth and development plans, which include the acquisition and revitalization of commercial properties, the investment in new and existing local community-based businesses, commitment to economic justice, entrepreneurialism, and community financial literacy. Along with this announcement comes the launch of several programs, businesses, and initiatives: The ConnCAT Community Economic Impact Lab, a business incubator for entrepreneurs; A Health Equity Initiative to address health disparities worsened by the pandemic; The launch of Monterey Chicken, one of the first cloud kitchens in Connecticut; and ConnCAT Place on Dixwell, which was recently approved in a unanimous vote of the Board of Alders.

CONTRIBUTED PHOTOS Erik Clemons: Taking ConnCORP to the next level.

ConnCAT needs and I’m confident that our community of students, parents, families, and alumni are in good hands.”

“I’m excited and grateful for the trust

placed in me to lead ConnCAT as we double down on our commitment to economic justice as we support families through the dual pandemics of the recession and COVID-19,” Walker said. “Our work has and will always be focused on building a New Haven where everyone has the opportunity to succeed. And I’m humbled by the opportunity to support and lead that mission.”

ConnCAT’s leadership shifts will enable the increased community engagement of the Dixwell project, a $200 million multi-use development project aimed at supporting community revitalization and intergenerational wealth creation. The project is slated to transform downtown New Haven, adding 150 rental apartments, 20 townhomes, 50,000 square feet of office space, and 128,000 square feet of ground-level retail space.

“ConnCAT Place on Dixwell has been about community building from day one and that doesn’t change with these transitions,” Clemons said. “We are working off the concept of restorative economic development, where everyone has a seat at the table so that our actions benefit everyone but especially current residents.”

Congratulations to LT Samod Rankins!

Genevive Walker, the new ConnCAT CEO.

Paul McCraven, who spearheaded the acquisition of the properties that laid the groundwork for ConnCAT Place on Dixwell, will remain as President leading real estate activities and food businesses.

With its widened mission, ConnCORP seeks to drive economic development in these sections of the city by investing in local commercial and residential real estate. The objective is to deliver well-planned multi-use real estate investment, which can help stabilize the local economy, provide affordable goods and services, and create local jobs.

As ConnCAT’s second employee and founding Director of Programs until being named Chief Operating Officer, Walker’s commitment to excellence in programming and dedication to supporting families has been pivotal to establishing the organization as a trusted leader and community partner. She has a proven track record of building community commitment into everything the organization does.

“With Genevive’s leadership and the

expansion of ConnCORP’s mission, I am confident that we will greatly enhance ConnCAT’s ability to deliver to the residents of our city the tools, the resources, and most importantly, the hope they need to succeed.” Carlton Highsmith, ConnCAT board chair. “Clemons’s passionate commitment to uplifting all within the community is unparalleled.

His deep understanding of community, his belief in economic justice for all, and his tireless advocacy for the under-served uniquely equip him to lead ConnCORP as Walker takes the helm at ConnCAT leading the vision to build a New Haven where everyone has the opportunity to succeed. This is a natural evolution born out of nearly 10 years of hard work and dedication.”

“Genevive has and continues to do great work for ConnCAT,” Clemons said. “Her appointment is a testament to ConnCAT’s commitment to build and nurture Black leaders from within the organization and the community. Her leadership is exactly what the next decade of work at

10

On behalf of President Carrie-Edward’s Clemons and the Executive Board of the IABPFF, we are proud of your accomplishments and your commitment to the community you serve.

Continue to stand firm in your commitment to diversity and inclusion in the Fire Service.

Gary Tinney Executive Vice President of the International Association of Professional Black Firefighters.

THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

“Crush Covid” Sentiment Reigns At Church Pop-Up

by COURTNEY LUCIANA New Haven I ndependent

Fifty-four more people received Covid-19 vaccinations at Bethel AME Church on Goffe Street on Tuesday.

With the official expansion of vaccine qualifications from 55-65 years old starting this week, demand has mushroomed, and additional vaccination sites are popping up, and getting filled.

Yale New Haven Health ran the pop up.

Technically, the pop-up was supposed to be for New Haven residents only. Others did end up getting shots, but no one seemed to mind, A broader mission of ending the pandemic prevailed.

New Haven natives and Bethel congregants Donald McAulay Sr., 58, and his wife, Debbie Stanley-McAulay, 55 (pictured in center), both felt encouraged to receive the vaccination alongside familiar faces of the community. McAulay Sr. has attended Bethel AME Church all his life.

He said that receiving the Covid-19 vaccine at the church will prompt his family and friends to do the same.

“I was going to get the vaccine anyway, but I think that the availability and trust is key,” Donald said. “The fact that they can come in their neighborhood, come across the street here, or catch the bus here is

huge. I think more and more of the African American community will understand the need for the vaccine; being able to do it right here allows more people to take advantage.”

As eligibility expands, vacancies are quickly being filled. This includes people from outside the area, and may fill available vacancies for local residents.

Stanley-McAaulay, who works at Yale, said that she was pleasantly surprised to walk into Bethel and see a family friend working for the site. Debbie-Stanley said that she’s not worried about people coming from outside of the community to get shots — it’s all part of the mission to “Crush Covid,” she said.

“What concerns me is that the communication hasn’t penetrated the African American neighborhood” surrounding the church she said. “The efforts have to be very different. I don’t think an email is sufficient. I think there has to be a marketing campaign, door to door, and large organizations that are talking about crushing Covid.”

“Anyone was welcome to sign up. It’s geared for the community here,” said Yale New Haven Health Director of Community Health Nancy Hamson. “We had primarily members of this church, and their

The McAulays (center) and friends at the Bethel pop-up.

friends and family from the area.”

Delores Stafford, 62, of Westville heard about the vaccination pop-up through a friend of hers who works at Yale. Stafford said she had been eager to get her vac-

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cination.

“I had been trying to call early and get an appointment at Yale, the Hill Health Center, or just any place that I was told where I could try,” Stafford said. “I wasn’t 65

yet, so I was told that I had to keep waiting.”

Stafford said that because she lives not far from Dixwell and has family and friends in the area, she considers herself part of the community. She said that when she started vaccination, she reservations, but quickly realized that the only way to get her life and country back on track was to get everyone vaccinated.

“If everybody gets vaccinated, then eventually things will get close to normal.

I don’t think it’ll ever be the same again,” Stafford said. “I think that happens a lot with people coming into the inner city communities to get free things. With something as important as this, people are coming from everywhere. I wanted to wait my turn and make sure that the people who were older and needed it, got it.”

Leroy Mcdowell, 62, used to attend Bethel AME Church when he was younger. He has lived in Branford since the ‘70s. He said that he received a text message from YNHH alerting him about the pop-up Covid-19 vaccination site.

“I think I received the information because I used to be a member of Bethel AME Church,” Mcdowell said. “I didn’t attend anywhere in Branford to get vac-

Varick Vaccinates THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

by MAYA MCFADDEN

New Haven I ndependent

New Haven’s oldest Black church, Varick Memorial AME Zion Church, partnered with the Health Department to offer 51 vaccinations Wednesday at the city’s 12th pop-up clinic aimed at protecting communities of color from Covid-19.

Varick Pastor Kelcy Steele opened the church’s doors to the public to help make vaccination distribution accessible and equitable. Many people said they felt more secure getting vaccinated at a place of worship like Varick, Steele said.

“This is a safe place, and many came because they felt most comfortable inside a church,” Steele said.

So far the city has administered 7,351 vaccinations, including 5,555 first doses.

(That’s separate from the vaccinations administered by Yale New Haven Health, Hill and Fair Haven Health centers, or nursing homes), With these Wednesday pop-up events the city has gone out into the community to reach people who otherwise might not get the vaccine.“It’s very important for us to ensure that we provide the communities that historically have not had access to health care the opportunity to get vaccinated,” Mayor Justin Elicker said.

In coming weeks Varick will partner with Cornell Scott-Hill Health to offer an additional space for its weekly vaccination clinic, Steele said.

West Rock/West Hills Alder Honda Smith said she was skeptical about the vaccination when it first rolled out.

“Now I’ve got the courage because I want to live,” she said. “I was tired of sitting at home in fear.”

Smith recorded the ten-minute process of registering for the vaccination then getting the shot on Facebook Live to urge the community to follow in her footsteps.

Christopher Blazejovsky, 32, who lives in a New Haven sober house, heard from the home’s owner that he was eligible to get vaccinated.

Blazejovsky went through drug and alcohol treatment in Florida and recently was moved to New Haven. The pandemic has caused for his recovery journey to be more difficult because of a lack of family time, he said. “It’s been tough with staying sober when you can’t do much to stay busy.”

His treatment meetings have been switched to a virtual platform. “You don’t have the security of hugging or shaking hands” Blazejovsky said.

After getting vaccinated, Blazejovsky said he hopes to visit his family more often.

Dixwell/Prospect Hill Alder Steve Winter said the city must expedite its strategy to open vaccination sites in neighbor-

MAYA MCFADDEN PHOTOVarick’s vaccination pop-up Wednesday.

Pastor Steele: Medical distrust is understandable. Please still get the vaccine.

Alder Smith gets her first dose at Wednesday’s pop-up.

hoods the way it expanded Covid testing in the summer.

“We need to ramp up access to vaccinations in the community so that our Black and brown residents are well served,” Winter said.

Sharon Willard, 71, got vaccinated Wednesday as a staff member at Community Action of New Haven.

“I know others are hesitant, so I figured I ought to get it,” she said. Willard said she called into the Health Department last week and within five minutes was offered her Wednesday appointment.

Charles Moye, 73, couldn’t get vaccinated at his local CVS in Seymour because they hadn’t received their shipment. He called the New Haven Health Department Tuesday and got scheduled for a Wednes-

day appointment.

Moye was urged by his son to get vaccinated because his underlying health issues put him at risk if he gets Covid. Since the start of the pandemic, Moye has been avoiding visiting he hospital as much as possible. “I’m still not sure what’s in it and all of its effects. because they don’t tell you that stuff. But I don’t want to run out of time when they run out,” he said of the vaccine.

While in nursing school, Moye visited a hospital and saw a patient suffering from a severe case of the flu struggling to use a ventilator. Moye recalled thinking to himself: “I don’t want to die like that.” So he got the vaccination.

Since the start of the pandemic Annette Moore-Powell, 67, has been only

12

Varick vaccination clinic Wednesday.

to church and the grocery store. MoorePowell, who lives in North Haven, got vaccinated after her daughter, who lives in New Haven, told her about the Varick pop-up site. “It was nice here. A church definitely makes it feel more safe,” she said.

Moore-Powell was motivated to get vaccinated by her nephew, who caught Covid recently. “The way he explained it to me is like nothing you want to get,” she said of Covid-19. She also has a niece who got sick from Covid.

Despite being worried about the potential side effects of the vaccination, she got her first dose of the vaccine Wednesday and left with a scheduled appointment to get her second dose in March.

Whiling bringing his mom to get vacci-

nated, James Carr noticed the registration sheet said first responders are eligible to get the shot. As a fire inspector for Yale University, Carr didn’t hesitate to register himself as well Wednesday. “It’s a nobrainer,” he said.

The pandemic has increased Carr’s workload at the department. Not only has work caused him stress, he said, but some of his friends have passed away after catching Covid.

“I want to avoid passing it along to my mom and the community,” he said.

All community members who got vaccinated Wednesday left with a scheduled follow-up appointment to get their second dose at Varick on March 24.

THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

Sickle Cell Assn.

Has High Turnout At 1st Blood Drive

President Biden Taps Meharry Medical College President for COVID Task Force

James Rawlings (pictured at right), executive director of Sickle Cell Disease Association of America Southern CT, sent in this write-up and these photos.

The Sickle Cell Disease Association of America Southern CT hosted its first blood drive at Beulah Heights Church to benefit the Sickle Cell community of Southern CT. The blood drive was scheduled to serve hopefully 40 donors, since it was our first blood drive. However nearly 70 individuals attended to donate.

The need for the blood drive was driven in part by the lack of blood donations in this Covid -19 era and also the disproportionate need for blood transfusions for the Sickle Cell community.

Another benefit of our successful blood drive, according to the American Red Cross, was that of all the donors, 40 percent were first-time donors, a spectacular achievement that spoke so highly of the community’s support of the Sickle Cell community.

It should also be noted that Sickle Cell Disease is the most common genetic disease in the U.S.

Meharry Medical College President and CEO Dr. James Hildreth has been named

by President Joe Biden as a member of his COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force.

Dr. Hildreth, the renowned immunologist and academic administrator and Meharry’s 12th president, sat on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration board that approved the first U.S. coronavirus vaccines.

“I am honored to be chosen by President Biden as a member of the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force. We are facing one of the largest challenges in the history of our nation,” Dr. Hildreth wrote in a statement.

“COVID-19 has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, and if adequate steps are not taken, this number will continue to grow. As we have seen, COVID-19 does not discriminate, it does not respect borders, and it does not behave according to our timelines,” Dr. Hildreth added.

The United States has reported more than 27.2 million cases of the virus, and the death toll is nearing 470,000.

Immediately following his Jan. 21 swearing-in, President Biden issued a national strategy for the COVID-19 response and pandemic preparedness.

“For the past year, we could not turn to the federal government for a national plan to answer prayers with action – until today,” President Biden stated.

He then issued a 200-page report outlining a national strategy to beat the pandemic.

The President called it a comprehensive

By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent

plan that starts with restoring public trust and mounting an aggressive, safe, and effective vaccination campaign.

“It continues with the steps we know that stop the spread like expanded masking, testing, and social distancing. It’s a plan where the federal government works with states, cities, Tribal communities, and private industry to increase supply and administer testing and the vaccines that will help reopen schools and businesses safely,” President Biden remarked.

“Equity will also be central to our strategy so that the communities and people being disproportionately infected and killed by the pandemic receive the care they need and deserve.”

The President further noted that defeating the pandemic would take Congress providing the necessary funding, and families and neighbors continuing to look out for one another.

He said the country would need health care providers, businesses, civic, reli-

gious and civil rights organizations, and unions all rallying together in common purpose and with urgency, purpose, and resolve.

“We will need to reassert America’s leadership in the world in the fight against this and future public health threats,” President Biden asserted.

Dr. Hildreth noted that the virus has had the largest impact on communities of color, among Black and brown Americans with underlying health conditions.

“Without our immediate attention and a national, organized effort to fight this virus, we will be dealing with its impact for years to come,” Dr. Hildreth remarked.

“As the President of a historically Black medical school that was founded to eradicate health disparities between majority and minority communities, this work is a focus for me and my institution. I am committed to working with our national leadership to develop cohesive plans that will address these silent killers – illnesses like COVID-19 that impact our most vulnerable populations at alarming rates,” Dr. Hildreth stated further.

“We must address the pandemic together. I am confident that President Biden’s heightened focus on the pandemic will accelerate testing, treatment and vaccinations nationwide – proven strategies that will work to mitigate the virus and protect our people.

“I look forward to working with my esteemed colleagues on the Task Force to restore health, wellbeing and stability to all of America.”

Meharry Medical College President and CEO Dr. James Hildreth.

OP-ED: A Question for Black Americans: Vaccine or Body Bag? Dr. John Warren, Publisher, San Diego Voice and Viewpoint

two vaccines currently being used.

But Black people, who are at the greatest risk of dying from COVID- 19, have the lowest rate of receiving the vaccine, it appears, for two reasons: one, we have logistical issues of appointment, locations and transportation; and two, we actually have people refusing to take the vaccine in spite of current scientific data developed by a Black scientist that proves the vaccines save lives.

No one is thinking of forcing any of us to take the vaccine if we decide not to. But we should understand that the virus and its developing mutations, which have taken almost 500,000 lives in the United States alone, appears to come down to two choices: the vaccine or a body bag.

The body bag is what we use to remove the bodies of those who die, regardless of the cause. Those who refuse to take the vaccine should know that you become

Today there is a crisis in Black America that is greater than the Tuskegee experiment itself. That experiment for more than 30 years deliberately used Black men as lab rats to test the effects of syphilis on men infected with venereal disease. It took over 30 years, but the experiments were discovered and exposed.

The people conducting those experiments were all White. But some things have changed. One such change is the presence of Black scientists engaged in research affecting Black people.

Today, in the case of the development of a vaccine to fight COVID-19, a female Black Scientist named Dr. Kizmekia Corbett, at the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center has led the research. She has been the lead scientist in the development of one of the

13

possible transmitters of the virus, if not affected directly yourself. This means that family and loved ones can die as a result of contact with those who have not taken the vaccine as a means of stopping the transmission of the virus.

This also means that until such time as we have full vaccinations of the entire country, those of us who have not had the vaccine yet will have to rethink our personal relationships with those close to us who refuse to take the vaccine. Let us not forget that each person has a right to refuse the vaccine, but that right must not get confused with our right to choose to live.

The choice really is between the vaccine and the body bag. We know the body bags will go to those who did not take the vaccines first, but will their refusal cause others among us to die and get a body bag also?

THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

New Study: Innocent Blacks Seven Times More Likely to be Wrongfully Convicted of Murder Than Innocent Whites more than 8 minutes, Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck, which caused his death.

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, cases of Black people exonerated from wrongful murder convictions were 22 percent more likely to involve police misconduct than similar cases involving White defendants.

“The legacy of slavery, racist Jim Crow laws, and hateful lynching has translated into modern-day mass incarceration and the disproportionate imprisonment of Black people,” Daniele Selby wrote for The Innocence Project.

“Nowhere is that seen more clearly than in prisons like the Mississippi State Penitentiary — also known as Parchman Farm — and Louisiana’s Angola prison, which were built on and modeled after slave plantations and where several Innocence Project clients have been incarcerated,” Selby penned.

By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent

According to the latest report from The Innocence Project, innocent Black people are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder than innocent White people.

The nonprofit legal organization committed to convicted of murder when the victim is White.

Among Black people exonerated of murder convictions, approximately 31 percent were wrongly convicted of killing White people. However, only 15 percent of homicides by Black people involve White victims, the National Registry of Exonerations reported.

Released in February, the latest report revealed that it also takes longer for attorneys to achieve exoneration for an innocent Black person.

African Americans spend an average of nearly 14 years wrongly imprisoned before exoneration – or 45 percent longer than White people. exonerating wrongly convicted individuals also noted that Black people are more likely to be wrongly Further, “Black people tend to receive harsher sentences when accused of sexual assault and have a harder time being exonerated from a wrongful conviction,” researchers at The Innocent Project wrote.

“On average, they spend 4.5 more years in prison than their White counterparts

before being exonerated,” the researchers found.

As talk and tepid action by lawmakers toward real criminal justice reform continues, the latest reports revealed that Black people wrongly convicted of murder spend an average of three more years in prison than White people – four if they are on death row.

Innocent Black people spend an average

of 16 years on death row before they are exonerated, researchers wrote.

As the March 8 trial of former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin nears, researchers concluded that police misconduct occurred in more than half of all wrongful murder conviction cases involving innocent Black people.

Chauvin, who is White, is being tried for killing George Floyd, a Black man. For

She continued: “Racial discrimination and bias has been ingrained in the criminal legal and law enforcement system from its earliest days and continues to pervade every level of the system today. The Innocence Project, with your support, is committed to addressing these injustices.”

The report arrives approximately one year after controversial – but largely unchecked – remarks by Manhattan, New York, District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. After a jury returned two guilty verdicts

against former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, Vance incredulously had this to say about allegations of rape and sexual assault: “It’s rape even if there is no physical evidence.”

The district attorney stated that the verdicts against Weinstein “pulled the justice system into the 21st Century. It’s a new day. Their verdict turned the page on our justice system on men like Harvey Weinstein.”

While the verdict may have turned the page on White men like Weinstein, African Americans have always struggled to receive fair treatment by the police and unprejudiced trials in the courtroom.

“By the preconceived notion, a man of color accused of rape, by a White woman, is presumed guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” editors at the American Bar Association wrote in 2019.

“In the case of a White man accused of raping an African American woman, the presumption of guilt shifts from the White defendant to the African American female victim. Here, there is a presumption that a woman is unchaste because the color of her skin is Black,” the editors continued.

“Alternatively, the standard applied to the White defendant is the presumption that he is innocent until the African American victim is proven pure, innocent, and deserving of the law beyond a White person’s reasonable doubt.”

Hip Hop Hall of Fame Café & Hip Hop Museum Gallery to Open in New York

NEW YORK — (BUSINESS WIRE) — The Hip Hop Hall of Fame™ is proud to announce that it will open its flagship Hip Hop Hall of Fame Café ™ & Hip Hop Museum Gallery in Harlem, NYC in 2021 post covid vaccine. The Official ‘Hip Hop Cafe’ hopes to serve as an inspirational and valuable partner in the Restaurant, Retail, Arts, Entertainment, and Small Business economic recovery, creating jobs, and revitalization of Harlem and New York City in association with our decade long partnership with the Annual Harlem Week Celebration and Harlem Hip Hop Festival™ with the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce.

The Hip Hop Café & Lounge Experience

The co-branded themed Café’ is the hiphop version of the Hard Rock Café and Madame Tussaud’s. The venue includes the Café, Sports Bar, Concert Lounge featuring Live Events, Retail Gift Store, Museum Gallery, and Educational STEAM programs for youth cultivating job-training, and career preparation. The menu will honor past and present Hip Hop Legends & Icons and celebrities as we celebrate their legacies with memorabilia and interactive exhibits.

The Museum Gallery

The Gallery will open with a themed ‘Hip Hop Activism & Black Lives Matter’ Visual Arts and Music Exhibition that will engage visitors with a series of impactful presentations on hip-hop music & culture artists, celebrities, athletes, and activists who have been at the forefront of the new Civil Rights and Community SocioEconomic Empowerment movement. The Gallery will feature other Hip Hop History Interactive exhibits and collections.

The Educational Programming & Outreach The Hip Hop Education programs will feature ‘Culinary Chef, Hospitality, and TV/Film Production’ training programs to accelerate our push for Diversity & Inclusion in the restaurant, retail, and multi-media entertainment industries inconjunction with our NYC Schools Arts and Media programming with our Thrive

14

Collective partners.

The Hip Hop Hall of Fame and Museum & Hotel Residential Retail Entertainment Complex The main Official Hip Hop Hall of Fame + Museum & Hotel Mega-Entertainment Complex development project in Manhattan, NYC is making steady progress and is on track to break ground with site demolition later this year to open in Manhattan in 2023. The private stock offering IPO fund

will provide a ‘co-ownership’ opportunity for private investors, fans, artists, celebrities, athletes, executives, and Wall Street firms to buy ‘equity stock’ in this historical real estate development project that will be ‘owned and operated’ by hip hop culture with our partners.

This historical project can become a galvanizing force of unity across all economic, educational, religious, and geographical barriers to unify our multi-generational audiences nationally and internationally to accelerate growth and opportunities in America growing with the protest stages to an actionable community ‘socio-economic empowerment and ownership’ stage leading by example by “owning our development project.”

The Hip Hop Hall of Fame is a Chartered Non-Profit organization whose mission is to preserve, promote and showcase the past, present and future of hip-hop music and cultural arts, founded by Sir JT Thompson, the creator and executive producer of the Hip Hop Hall of Fame Awards TV Show that premiered on BET Network in the 1990s.

For information follow the Hip Hop Hall of Fame on Twitter @HipHopHoF , Facebook @HipHopHallofFame , Instagram @OfficialHipHopHoF, Website http://hiphophof.org.

THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

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“Quit Playin” Has Dropped by Three Years THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

CDC:

Life Expectancy of Black Men

A Black Culture Renaissance!

By Lauren Victoria Burke, NNPA Newswire Correspondent

Black Americans have lost three years in life expectancy over the last two years according to estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The decline is the largest since World War II. The life expectancy gap by race is now the widest since 1998 and at a 15-year low overall.

Non-Hispanic Black males now have the lowest life expectancy of any group.

The new data shows that African Americans on average live six years less in life expectancy than Whites. The Covid-19 pandemic hit Black and Americans harder than any other group of Americans. Underlying health issues and lack of health care were a factor.

Overall, African Americans are hospitalized at three times the rate of white Americans. African Americans die at double the rate from COVID than all other groups according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The impact of COVID-19, which is the cause of 500,000 deaths in less than two years, is a leading cause, not just on deaths directly due to infection but also from heart disease, cancer and other conditions. The definition of “life expectancy” is calculated by how long someone born today is expected to live. The average life expectancy last year was 77.8.

Though Covid-19 was clearly the driver of the depressing new statistics on life expectancy, drug overdoses and other health factors also factored into the data.

President Biden and Democrats in Con-

By Vincent L. Hall, Texas Metro News

gress are currently structuring a multibillion COVID relief package. Former President Trump largely ignored the coronavirus crisis as mortality numbers mounted. After Trump’s loss to Biden, departments of the federal government are focused on the COVID pandemic.

Lauren Victoria Burke is an independent journalist for NNPA and the host of the podcast BURKEFILE. She is also a political strategist as Principal of Win Digital Media LLC. She may be contacted at LBurke007@gmail.com and on twitter at @LVBurke

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This final installment of our Black History Month series relies on the concept that Black Culture was pivotal as we rose from slavery to self-sufficiency. The Black Church, Black Preacher, and Black women laid the foundation, but our culture built the walls. The kidnapped Africans dropped on these shores arrived with social norms and art forms that ranged from ritualistic to spiritualistic. The mind, body, and soul of the same African who tended the cradle of civilization still moors us to a semblance of sanity. The fact that Africans in America in 2021 are not stark raving mad is partly because of our culture of resiliency and our commitment to formal and informal scholarship.

The Black Renaissance period was the pinnacle of that cultural awareness. It’s time for the 2.0 version. Horace Meyer Kallen, a Prussian emigrant, mastered philosophy at Harvard University so well that before being elected president, Woodrow Wilson hired him at Princeton. In 1908, Kallen returned to Harvard and earned a doctorate. While studying at Harvard, Kallen became friends with Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes Scholar. There were no more until the 1960s. “Cultural pluralism,” according to Kallen, declared that different ethnic groups have enriched the American way of life. As immigrants and native-born citizens learned new cultures, America was fortified.

The art, food, education, history, music, and other differences became assets to the unique national experience. Locke made an appearance as the guest editor in the March 1925 issue of the periodical “Survey Graphic.” He headlined a special edition, ”Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro.”

Locke waxed eloquently and effectively on the virtues and communal benefits of the Harlem Renaissance. Cultural pluralism was in full view. December of 1925, saw Locke expand the issue into “The New Negro.” It was a collection of writings by him and other African Americans and it was called the “first national book” of African America.

Locke contributed five essays: the “Foreword,” “The New Negro,” “Negro Youth Speaks,” “The Negro Spirituals,” and “The Legacy of Ancestral Arts.” The New Negro did more than educate the masses about Black culture. Locke’s writings and theories coagulated the diverse and warm-blooded artistic ability of former slaves. He was immediately hailed as

the “Father of the Harlem Renaissance.”

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy further widened the historical aperture to give us a more vivid snapshot of Locke’s philosophical value and worth. “Locke was a distinguished scholar and educator and during his lifetime an important philosopher of race and culture.

Principal among his contributions in these areas was developing the notion of “ethnic race,” Locke’s conception of race as primarily a matter of social and cultural, rather than biological, heredity.” African Americans continue to suffer from external beliefs that our biology and heredity make us less than. The Harlem Renaissance was important because it proved that we accomplish whatever we desire when we define ourselves and dismiss our naysayers. It is past time for us to prioritize and promote our own creativity and culture. European art, thought and culture cannot be the yardstick for the “Black experience.”

If Henry VIII could have developed gospel, blues, and jazz music, he would have.

We can never lose sight of the advantages that our disadvantages have granted us.

Lemonade without lemons leaves little to celebrate! The church, the preacher, our women’s strength, and our cultural ancestry serve to reprove our viability on this earth. The 11th and unspoken Commandment of our credo must be that we define ourselves for ourselves. Therefore, the best advice that this writer can give you sums up this Black History Month series: Stay with the Black church, listen to the preacher, do what your mama tells you and be the best of who you are.

THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

Elizabeth Keckley, Thirty Years a Slave, Four Years in the White House “She even asked Frederick Douglass to take part in a lecture to raise money, although the lecture ultimately did not come to fruition,” the White House historians wrote.

The book was not well received by Lincoln or the American public.

Whites turned on Keckley for disclosing conversations and her relationship with Mrs. Lincoln.

Mostly, they claimed it violated social norms of privacy, race, class, and gender.

“Her choice to publish correspondence between herself and Mary Lincoln was seen as an infringement on the former first lady’s privacy,” historians wrote.

By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent

A Black woman’s memoir published 153 years ago still tops Amazon’s books sales chart.

“Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House,”

by Elizabeth Keckley, currently stands as the 24th most popular book in Amazon’s category of U.S. Civil War Women’s History.

The historical work was perhaps the bluntest and most controversial of its era.

Keckley detailed her life as a slave who purchased her freedom and then worked in the White House for two U.S. first ladies – Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of President Abraham Lincoln, and Varina Davis, the wife of President Jefferson Davis.

A seamstress to both Davis and Lincoln, Keckley practically lived in the White House during the Civil War. Because Keckley made her close relationships with the Lincolns so public, the reaction nearly ruined the Lincolns’ reputation and almost destroyed Keckley’s life.

In the 166-page memoir, Keckley recalls an intimate scene between President and Mrs. Lincoln after learning their son, Willie, had died in 1862.

“I assisted in washing him and dressing him, and then laid him on the bed when

Keckley addressed her critics in the preface to her memoir: Mr. Lincoln came in. I never saw a man so bowed down with grief,” Keckley wrote.

“He came to the bed, lifted the cover from the face of his child, gazed at it long and earnestly, murmuring, ‘My poor boy, he was too good for this earth. God has called him home. I know that he is much better off in heaven, but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die.’”

Immediately after President Lincoln’s 1865 assassination, Mary Todd Lincoln sent for Keckley.

According to WhiteHouseHistory.org, when Mrs. Lincoln was later “drowning in

debt,” she reached out to Keckley to assist in selling off her wardrobe and other items to raise money.

Because the auctions failed to solicit any funds for Lincoln, Keckley reached out to prominent African Americans for assistance, including asking leaders in the Black church to take up offerings for her former boss.

“If I have betrayed confidence in anything I have published, it has been to place Mrs. Lincoln in a better light before the world. A breach of trust – if breach it can be called – of this kind is always excusable,” Keckley penned.

“My own character, as well as the character of Mrs. Lincoln, is at stake since I have been intimately associated with that lady in the most eventful periods of her life. I have been her confidante, and if evil charges are laid at her door, they also must be laid at mine, since I have been a party to all her movements,” she added.

Keckley continued: “To defend myself, I must defend the lady that I have served. The world has judged Mrs. Lincoln by the facts which float upon the surface, and through her have partially judged me, and the only way to convince them that wrong was not meditated is to explain the motives that actuated us.”

Born in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, in 1818, Keckley endured years of beatings and sexual assault as a slave. She bore her slave master’s child, George, and was then given away to her owner’s daughter, who moved her to St. Louis.

Keckley learned the art of dressmaking and, in 1852, married James Keckley, whom she believed was free.

Before her marriage, she negotiated a $1,200 price to buy her freedom but discovered she couldn’t raise the money for herself, her son, and her husband.

However, customers to her small seamstress shop loaned Keckley the money to purchase freedom for her and her son, and in 1860, she moved to Washington, D.C. “She left Washington in 1892 to teach domestic skills at Wilberforce University, but ill health forced her to return and spend her final years in the Home for Destitute Women and Children, which she had helped to establish,” historians wrote.

Elizabeth Keckley died in 1907 after suffering a stroke.

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THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

She Bought Freedom for Herself and Other Slaves

By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent

In her early years, Alethia Browning Tanner sold vegetables in a produce stall near President’s Square – now known as Lafayette Square – in what is now Northwest Washington, D.C. According to the D.C. Genealogy Research, Resources, and Records, Tanner bought her freedom in 1810 and later purchased several relatives’ release.

She was the first woman on the Roll of Members of the Union Bethel AME Church (now Metropolitan AME Church on M Street), and Turner owned land and a store at 14th and H Streets, which she left to her nephews – one of whom later sold the property for $100,000.

Named in her honor, the Alethia Tanner Park is located at 227 Harry Thomas Way in Northeast DC. The park sits near the corner of Harry Thomas Way and Q Street and is accessible by foot or bike via the Metropolitan Branch Trail, just north of the Florida Ave entrances.

“The first Council legislative meeting of Black History Month, the Council took a second and final vote on naming the new park for Alethia Tanner, an amazing woman who is more than worthy of this long-delayed recognition,” Ward 5 Councilman Kenyan McDuffie said in 2020 ahead of the park’s naming ceremony. “[Her upbringing] itself would be a re-

markable legacy, but Ms. Tanner was also active in founding and supporting many educational, religious, and civic institutions,” McDuffie remarked.

“She contributed funds to start the first school for free Black children in Washington, the Bell School. Feeling unwelcome at her predominately segregated church, she & other church members founded the Israel Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. When the church fell on hard times and was sold at auction by creditors, she and her family stepped in and repurchased the church.”

Born in 1781 on a plantation owned by Tobias and Mary Belt in Prince George’s County, Maryland, historians noted that Tanner had two sisters, Sophia Bell and Laurena Cook.

“Upon the death of Mary Pratt (Tobias had predeceased his wife) in 1795, the plantation, known as Chelsea Plantation, was inherited by their daughter Rachel Belt Pratt,” historians wrote.

“Mary Belt’s will stipulated that Laurena be sent to live with a sibling of Rachel Pratt’s while Sophia and Alethia were to stay at the Chelsea Plantation.”

Tanner sold vegetables at the well-known market just north of the White House in Presidents Park. It is possible – and probable – she met Thomas Jefferson there as he was known to frequent the vegetable markets there along with other prominent early Washingtonians, according to historians at attacksadams.com.

Today a Park is Named in Her Honor

“There are also White House records suggesting she worked for Thomas Jefferson in some capacity, likely doing various housework tasks,” the researchers determined.

Tanner saved enough money to purchase her freedom in 1810. “The total amount, thought to have been paid in installments, was $1,400. In 1810, $1,400 was a significant amount; about the equivalent of

three years’ earnings for an average skilled tradesperson,” attucksadams.com researchers surmised.

“Self-emancipation was not an option for all enslaved peoples, but both Alethia and her sister Sophia were able to accomplish this, almost entirely through selling vegetables at the market,” the researchers continued.

“Alethia Tanner moved to D.C. and be-

came one of a significant and growing number of free Black people in the District. In 1800, 793 free Black people were living in D.C. By 1810, there were 2,549, and by 1860, 11,131 free Black people lived in D.C., more than the number of enslaved peoples.”

Historians wrote that beginning at about 15 years after securing her manumission, Alethia Tanner worked to purchase the freedom of more than 20 of her relatives and neighbors, mostly the family of her older sister Laurana including Laurana herself, her children, and her grandchildren.

All in all, Tanner would have paid the Pratt family well over $5,000. All accomplished with proceeds from her own vegetable market business, they concluded.

“Alethia Tanner, it’s an amazing story of resilience, hard work, and perseverance,” D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation Director Delano Hunter said at the park’s dedication.

“I just learned about this history through this, so it shows how when you name a park, you really educate people on the historical significance.”

Alethia Browning Tanner worked to purchase the freedom of more than 20 of her relatives and neighbors, mostly the family of her older sister Laurana including Laurana herself, her children, and her grandchildren.

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18

THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

IN MEMORIAM:

Civil Rights Icon Vernon Jordan Dies at 85

By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent

Vernon Jordan, the former National Urban League president and civil rights leader, has died at 85.

Vickee Jordan Adams, the icon’s daughter, confirmed his death on Tuesday.

“My father passed away last night at around 10 p.m. surrounded by loved ones, his wife and daughter, by his side,” Adams noted in a statement.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson said the world lost an influential figure in the fight for civil rights and American politics.

“An icon to the world and a lifelong friend to the NAACP, his contribution to moving our society toward justice is unparalleled,” Johnson declared.

“In 2001, Jordan received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal for a lifetime of social justice activism. His exemplary life will shine as a guiding light for all that seek truth and justice for all people.”

Added Congressional Black Caucus Chair Karen Bass (D-Calif.): “For decades, Mr. Jordan fought for the advancement of civil rights in this country. His contributions – first challenging segregation and discrimination as an activist in the 1960s and later continuing the fight in the leadership of the NAACP, the United Negro College Fund and then as President of the National Urban League – benefited us all.”

The congresswoman continued: As Chair of the Congressional Black

Caucus, I had the absolute humbled honor of meeting with Mr. Jordan multiple times to discuss the challenges of our time, but also our hope and optimism for the future.

While Mr. Jordan is no longer with us, we continue this fight surrounded by thousands inspired by his work and his leadership. My thoughts are with the family of Mr. Jordan and the many friends that join me in mourning his loss.”

A lawyer and Washington power broker, Jordan was born in Atlanta on August 15, 1935.

He attended the DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where he was the only African American student in his class.

According to his biography posted by The HistoryMakers, Jordan participated in the student senate at DePauw and won statewide honors in speaking competitions.

He played basketball and graduated in 1957.

In 1960, he earned a J.D. from the Howard University School of Law. Jordan returned to Atlanta, starting his legal career working with the civil rights movement.

“In 1961, he helped organize the integration of the University of Georgia and personally escorted student Charlayne Hunter through a hostile White crowd,” The HistoryMakers noted.

They continued: “Over the next ten years, Jordan held various positions as a civil rights advocate. He served as the Georgia field secre-

tary for the NAACP, director of the Voter Education Project for the Southern Regional Council, head of the United Negro College Fund, and as a delegate to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House Conference on Civil Rights.”

In 1971, Jordan was appointed president and CEO of the National Urban League, spearheading the organization’s growth.

On May 29, 1980, a White supremacist attempted to kill Jordan.

After a successful recovery, in 1981, Jordan resigned from the National Urban League to work as legal counsel with the

19

Washington, D.C. office of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer, and Feld.

His active practice includes corporate, legislative, and international clients, researchers at the HistoryMakers noted.

Jordan’s close friend is former President Bill Clinton, and during Clinton’s presidency, Jordan became one of Washington’s most influential power brokers, the researchers noted.

He also was a partner in the investment firm of Lazard Frere & Company in New York.

In 2001, Jordan published his autobiog-

raphy, “Vernon Can Read!,” and authored a weekly newspaper column syndicated to more than 300 newspapers and served as a frequent television guest and commentator.

“Mourning the passage of my friend, the extraordinary Vernon Jordan,” Stacey Abrams posted on Twitter.

“He battled the demons of voter suppression and racial degradation, winning more than he lost. He brought others with him. And left a map so more could find their way. Love to his family. Travel on with God’s grace.”

Erykah Badu at 50:

THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

Preserving The Tradition Of Doulas & Midwives It’s amazing how Erykah Badu can be both an old soul and a futuristic entity light years ahead. She is singularly timeless. Just one of the many, many superpowers of this mother/singer/songwriter who has mastered the gift of channeling creation. While making her rounds touring, hosting award shows, celebrating her birthday and her playing a supporting role in the 2019 film, What Men Want with Taraji P. Henson, Badu shared another way she channels creation into the world – as a certified doula.

The word ‘doula’, according to the website DONA International, means “a woman who serves” and a doula is a someone trained to provide continuous physical, emotional and informational support to the mother before, during and just after birth. While speaking with Sway, Badu explained, “In my definition of a doula, when the spirit comes in we don’t know where they’re coming from, we just want them to feel good. I also sit at the bedsides of hospices, where souls are going out, too. Because, I mean, we’re taught what’s gonna happen but the main thing I want is for people’s spirits to be at peace, whatever happens next.”

Among the many benefits of having a doula, studies have shown that when doulas attend birth, labors are shorter with fewer complications, babies are healthier and they breastfeed more easily.

Since 2001, Badu has assisted in 50 births and she says she keeps in contact with all her babies, who affectionately call her their “Badoula”.

Badu, a mother of three, delivered each of her children by home birth, but it was the pregnancy of a friend that put her in alignment to pursue training as a doula. She tells Sway: My best friends, two of them – stic.man [of Dead Prez] and his wife Afya – were in labor and I was on a flight and he called me and said that, ‘Afya told me to let you know that she’s in labor.’ And I re-routed my flight – This was in 2001 – to go to be with them here in Brooklyn. And I just stayed up with her. Her labor was natural, for fifty-two hours. Fifty-two hours. And I stayed up with her. I didn’t get sleepy or anything. I was able to just be there for her, whatever it took – singing, coaching, walking, bouncing, massaging. I had just had my son, a live, natural birth at home as well, so I had a little bit of experience. After that, I felt that well I can do this.

I can be the welcoming committee for new spirits coming in. That’s when I decided to start studying for it. I became a doula about five years ago.

Black Midwifery Before hospitals and technology became the norm, Black women relied on midwives. In traditional African culture, the midwife was the pillar of the community and keeper of sacred traditions. The International Center for Traditional Childbearing (ICTC) cites that, “Grand (Granny) midwives taught women how to be mothers

and taught men how to be good husbands and father, they played a large part in shaping cultural perceptions of motherhood as well as functioning as officiate in the rite of passage of becoming a mother.”

Sharon Robinson, critic and professor of midwifery and Black health care systems,

states in her 1984 study for the Journal of Nurse-Midwifery that the first Black lay midwife came to America in 1619, bringing with her knowledge of health and healing based on her African background.

Like many other of our customs and traditions, racism and patriarchal systems became barriers for Black women to continue their practice of midwifery. Today, organizations such as the ICTC, Black Women Birthing Justice and… Birthing Project USA to name a few are helping Black

women connect with their African tradition of home births by providing training, resources, education and a community of support.

What’s the difference between a midwife and doula?

A midwife is a trained medical professional. Per the American Pregnancy Association, midwives hold certification accredited by the Midwifery Education Accreditation Council (MEAC). With this certification they can work in private, public or group practice. Midwives can prescribe some medications, they can perform yearly gynecological exams, and they can deliver your child. They can also provide family planning, infant care, women’s health care, and provide prenatal and birthing care.

You can think of doulas like more of a coach for the mother. A doula should also go through training, certification and have experience with live births, but their primary job is really to be there for the mother throughout pregnancy, during the birth and in some cases, after delivery.

There are several doula certification programs available, including the more popular ones offered by ICTC, DONA, Childbirth Postpartum Professional Association (CPPA) and International Childbirth Education Association (ICEA).

In speaking about her own home births in an interview with Mantra Magazine, Badu shared, “My doula was very helpful too, but it still felt like I was being run over by a train and survived. [Laughter.] You know what I found out after that? I was surrounded by women in the room. I looked at myself and what was going on, and I said, “women are gods.”

Indeed we are, Goddess. On her debut, Baduizm ignited a neo-soul wildfire selling over three million albums, earning two Grammy Awards, and birthing its own concert album, Live, just nine months later.

Erykah Badu was born Erica Abi Wright, the Southern-girl daughter of Kolleen Wright, who worked as an actress in local theatrical productions. From Erica to Erykah, she honed her skills as a singer, dancer and actress and even worked as a host with Steve Harvey in a Dallas comedy club before her first EP dropped.

Still being able to headline tours and sell out shows in 2020, Erykah attributes her longevity to her clean lifestyle: thinking, living and eating clean, which includes being a vegan.

“I guess it’s the daily routine,” admits Badu. “I don’t have any particular thing I do ritualistically. I do the same thing every day. I get up. Drink a lot of water. Have a wheatgrass shot. Drink some green juice.

Eat as healthy as I can. I’m not trying to win an award for being the best vegetarian, just want to be healthy. Take a salt bath. Do things that my parents were never able to do. I’m blessed to do anything I want so I decide to take the best care of my body and my family in the same way. Holistically.

Vitally.”

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Con’t from page 04

Two Musicians Mine The Moment

double as a mirror for many of their listeners. In March, the U.S. will mark a year of shutdowns, stay-at-home orders, skyrocketing unemployment, an eviction crisis, and over 500,000 deaths. But Godwynn’s uncertainty is a less explicit one: they are questioning and re-questioning what is off in their body, and reaching toward a resolution.

“I/had a dream my chains broke/but when I awoke I found them safe up in my head,” they sing in “Perhaps.” The lyrics alone are enough to get a listener to pay attention. Thursday, Abdussabur said they noticed the writing of the piece right away.

They first listened to the EP at one in the morning, with tea and candles. They’ve been coming back to it constantly since.

“Ro’s lyricism has not only always been fire, but I see the lyricism that they’re playing on in this album versus the last in a very particular way,” they said. “I feel like I’m in an art gallery. Of Ro. A bad perhaps? What are the bad perhaps, what are the bad maybes in my life?”

Attendees filled the chat with praise, some writing during the songs and others waiting, as if they were holding their breath. In “Sorry (pt. 1),” apologies spill out one after the other. Percussion rolls out beneath Godwynn’s voice, and suddenly the artist is a one-person ocean of sound, smooth enough to crawl into and scared enough to try and keep a distance.

The song is confessional, but never overwrought: “I didn’t mean/To be so mean/ I’m just having a hard day,” they sing.

Their voice seems at times limitless, rising still as it moves into “Sorry (pt. 2).”

Through a series of loops, a listener gets a whole orchestra of Godwynn. They are lucky for it: the artist is moving toward a reconciliation, but needs to take their time to take their time to get there. At the end of “Sorry (pt. 2),” piano and finger snaps hang in the air for a moment. There’s a breath before Godwynn presses on to “Intervene.”

“At this point in the EP, I’m choked,” said Abdussabur Thursday, after Goodwynn played both parts back to back. “I’m emotional. And I was like, damn ... who is Ro talking to? And I was like, who hurt Ro? Who hurt Ro?” It took Abdussabur a moment to realize Godwynn was talking to themselves.

“I give myself a very hard time. I do,” Godwynn responded. “But I don’t mean

to. But I do. I definitely wrote this song for people who might be like me, who have trouble vocalizing how they’re feeling.”

The end of The Godwynn Experience Vol. II digs into that doubt (“what should an echo chamber sound like from the outside?” Godwynn asks, their voice a tendril reaching for the sky). It is easy to conjure the image of Godwynn, working their way out of a dark, complicated place that they alone did not create. While the EP is just 12 minutes, it demands a second, and third, and fourth, and tenth listen.

Thursday, the two artists played off of each other, pausing to discuss songs in between works. Almost every answer was delivered half in song, as the two finished each other’s sentences. Conversation flowed between them, just as the EPs had wound around each other. Both said they were grateful for the space.

“When I thought about ‘River,’ I thought about it as a prayer for Black lives,” Abdussabur said, adding that they wrote “N” in a flow state, while thinking about the lives of their brothers and parents. “I think about the young boy who was found in Edgewood Park Pond, and thinking about prayer and purpose. It hit me hard to the point where I was not drinking water for a week. ‘River’ for me is healing every time I sing it.”

It became a testament to the way mutually supportive spaces can work across screens, internet networks, and miles that feel at once harder and easier to bridge.

Throughout the night, the two reminded attendees—and each other—that Black and queer voices are constantly placed in physical, psychological, and economic danger in New Haven and in the United States. Honoring them is part of the work they do when they record.

“This is an exciting time right now. for artists, for musicians,” said Godwynn to Abdussabur. “I feel like everyone who knows you knows you had it in you. It’s really nice to be on this side of the EP. I’ve only been at this for like eight minutes, but I feel like if there’s any guidance that I could give … hit me up. Because it’s all about community.”

Follow Salwa Abdussabur at @sweetsummermelanin on Instagram and listen to Breath here. Follow Ro Godwynn at @ rogodwynnthefirst on Instgram and listen to The Godwynn Experience Vol. 2 here.

yale institute of sacred music joins the

i n n e r city news in celebrating the accomplishments of African Americans to the cultural and spiritual life of New Haven and the world.

event listings at ism.yale.edu

THEINNER-CITY INNER-CITY NEWS March , 2021 - March 2021 NEWS- July 27,03 2016 - August 02, 09, 2016

PUBLIC COMMENT SESSION

NOTICE The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the Federal Transit Administra-

tion (FTA) are currently conducting a review of the South Central Regional Council of Governments’(SCRCOG) transportation planning process. This evaluation is VALENTINA MACRI RENTAL HOUSING PRE- APPLICATIONS AVAILABLEconducted every four years in order to certify our activities as the Metropolitan Planning Organization for the South Central Region.

New Haven Housing Authority, HOME INC,(MPO) on behalf of Columbus House and the is accepting pre-applications for studio and one-bedroom apartments at this devel-

Publiclocated comments will received at a Virtual Public opment at 108 Frankbe Street, New Haven.

Maximum incomeMeeting limitationson apMarch 2021 atfrom 12:00 ZOOM. ply. Pre-applications will be10, available 9AMPM Via TO 5PM beginning Monday Ju;y Join ending Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81855035822 25, 2016 and when sufficient pre-applications (approximately 100) have Call-InofNumber: +1-929-205-6099 been received at the offices HOME INC. Applications will be mailied upon reID: 818 5503 5822 quest by calling HOME INCMeeting at 203-562-4663 during those hours. Completed preapplications must be returned to HOME INC’s offices at 171 Orange Street, Third Floor, New Haven, CT 06510.

CROSSING GUARD: THE TOWN OF EAST HAVEN IS CURRENTLY

ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR THE POSITION OF CROSSING GUARD. INTERESTED CANDIDATES MUST BE AVAILABLE 10 HOURS PER WEEK, MONDAY THRU FRIDAY, MORNINGS AND AFTERNOONS DURING THE SCHOOL YEAR. THE POSITION PAYS $20.00/HOUR. AVAILABLE VALENTINA MACRI VIVIENDAS DE ALQUILER APPLICATIONS PRE-SOLICITUDESARE DISPONIBLES ONLINE AT www.townofeasthavenct.org<http://www.townofeasthavenct.org/> AND MUST BEINC, RETURNED BY MARCH House 26, 2021.

OF EAST HAVEN HOME en nombre de la Columbus y de THE la NewTOWN Haven Housing Authority, estáIS ANaceptando EQUALpre-solicitudes OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER. MINORITIES, FEMALES, HANDIpara estudios y apartamentos de un dormitorio en este desarrollo CAPPED ARE ENCOURAGED APPLY. ubicado AND en la VETERANS calle 109 Frank Street, New Haven. SeTO aplican limitaciones de ingresos

NOTICIA

máximos. Las pre-solicitudes estarán disponibles 09 a.m.-5 p.m. comenzando Martes 25 julio, 2016 hasta cuando se han recibido suficientes pre-solicitudes (aproximadamente 100) en las oficinas de HOME INC. Las pre-solicitudes serán enviadas por correo a petición

llamando a HOME INC al for 203-562-4663 esas horas.Pre-solicitudes deberánPrevious remitirse Full time Class A driver petroleumdurante deliveries for nights and weekends. aexperience las oficinasrequired. de HOMECompetitive INC en 171 Orange Street, tercer piso, New Haven , CT 06510 wage, 401(k) and benefits. Send resume to: HR.

DELIVERY PERSON

NEEDED

Part Time Delivery Needed One/Two Day a Week,

Must Have your Own Vehicle If Interested call

(203) 387-0354

Town of Bloomfield Finance Director Full Time - Benefited $96,755 to $149,345 Pre-employment drug testing.

For more details, visit our website – www.bloomfieldct.org

Listing: Commercial Driver

QSR STEEL CORPORATION

Manager, P. O. Box 388, Guilford, CT 06437.

********An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer**********

Steel Fabricators, Erectors & Welders Top pay for top performers. Health Benefits, 401K, Vacation Pay.

PJF Construction Corp is seeking to fill following positions.

HAVEN Laborer Heavy and NEW Highway Construction experience.

Equipment Operator 242-258 Heavy andFairmont Highway Construction experience.

Ave CDL Driver 2BR Townhouse, 1.5 BA, 3BR, 1 level , 1BA Prevailing Rate. PJF Construction Corporation is an equal opportunity employer M/F

All new apartments, new appliances, new carpet, close to I-91 & I-95

Please forwardhighways, inquiriesnear and/or to attielordan@gmail.com bus resumes stop & shopping center

Construction

Pet under 40lb allowed. Interested parties contact Maria @ 860-985-8258 Seeking employAssociation experienced individuals in the labor, foreman, operator and teamCT. UnifiedtoDeacon’s is pleased to offer a Deacon’s Certificate This is aoutside 10 monthwork program designed toReliable assist in thepersonal intellectualtransportation formation of Candidates ster tradesProgram. for a heavy statewide. and a in response to the Church’s Ministry needs. The cost is $125. Classes start Saturday, August 20, 2016 1:30valid driversChairman, license Deacon required. apply please 3:30 Contact: Joe To J. Davis, M.S., B.S. call (860) 621-1720 or send resume to: (203) 996-4517 Host, General Bishop Elijah Davis, D.D. Pastor of Pitts Chapel U.F.W.B. Church 64 Brewster

Personnel St. New Haven, CT

Department, P.O. Box 368, Cheshire, CT06410.

Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer M/F/V Drug Free Workforce

SEYMOUR HOUSING AUTHORITY Land Surveyor Civil Engineer

Sealed bids are invited by the Housing Authority of the Town of Seymour

Boundaries is aTuesday, full-service land surveying located CTStreet, We are until 3:00 LLC pm on August 2, 2016firm at its officein atGriswold, 28 Smith currently accepting resumes for the following positions:

Seymour, CT 06483 for Concrete Sidewalk Repairs and Replacement at the Smithfield Gardens Assisted Living Facility, 26 Smith Street Seymour.

Survey Field Technicians Survey Office Technicians

A pre-bid conference will Licensed be held atLand the Surveyors Housing Authority Office 28 Smith Civil Engineers Street Seymour, CT at 10:00 am, on Wednesday, July 20, 2016.

Resumes will be accepted from 2/15/21 through 12/31/2021. Interested parties can

contact us at 860-376-2006 or submit yourthe resume to jfaulise@boundariesllc.net Bidding documents are available from Seymour Housing Authority Office, 28 Smith Street, Seymour, CT 06483 (203) 888-4579.

Boundaries LLC is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer

The Housing Authority reserves the right to accept or reject any or all bids, to reduce the scope of the project to reflect available funding, and to waive any

APPLY NOW!

The Housing Authority of the City of New Haven is currently accepting applications for its Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) waitlist The Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCVP) provides rental assistance to help lowincome persons afford decent and safe rental housing. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funds the program and Elm City Communities (ECC) administers it in the city of New Haven. Once an applicant is pulled from the waitlist HCVP will issued a rental voucher and the applicant is then free to locate a dwelling unit suitable to the family’s needs and desires in the private rental market.

REQUIREMENTS: Earnings must be between 0-50% of the Area Median Income (AMI) at the time the applicant is drawn from the waitlist. Please see the table below for specific income and household requirements. Placement on the waitlist will be based on the date and time the application is received with accommodations made for applications received by mail or hand delivery to give fair access. Applications will be date and time stamped as they are received.

The waiting list will be updated as needed to ensure that all applicants and applicant information is current and timely. To update your online application please follow the instructions below: # of people in household Maximum

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

$35,950

$41,050

$46,200

$51,300

$55,450

$59,550

$63,650

Applications can be submitted or updated: Invitation to •Bid:Online at https://ecc.myhousing.com/

Email Resume: Rose@qsrsteel.com Hartford, CT AFFIRMATIVE ACTION/EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER

2nd Notice

FIREFIGHTER If you require a reasonable accommodation and would like to receive an SAYEBROOKE•VILLAGE City of Bristol Old Saybrook, CTapplication by mail, please call 475-355-7289 or

send a written request to Attention: Waitlist Coordinator, Elm City (4 Buildings, 17 Units) Communities, PO Box 1912, New Haven, CT 06509 $53,964/yr.

Tax Exempt & Not Prevailing Wage Rate Project Requires valid CPAT Cert Applications received via mail will be based on a lottery process. issued on or afterWood JuneFramed, 1, 2020, New Construction, Housing, Selective Demolition, Site-work, Castwritten & oralin-place tests. Concrete, RegistraAsphalt Shingles, Vinyla Siding, If you need reasonable accommodation to complete the application call 203tion 498-8800 ext.

1507 Flooring, Painting, Division 10 Specialties, Appliances, Residential Casework, informationMechanical, & apply online: Electrical, Plumbing and Fire Protection. www.bristolct.gov Applications are available now. The waitlist will remain open.

This contract is subject to state set-aside and contract compliance requirements.

DEADLINE: May 2021 Due Date: August 5, 2016 Bid1,Extended, Waste Water EOE Anticipated Start: August 15, 2016 Assistant Superintendent – Sewer. Assist in the technical and supervisory Project documents available via ftp link below: oversight of the water pollution control plant. Must have a bachelor’s degree in enhttp://ftp.cbtghosting.com/loginok.html?username=sayebrookevillage vironmental science, chemical engineering or other engineering with courses related

DELIVERY PERSON

NEEDED

to the waste treatment field, plus 4 years responsible experience in water pollution control ordawnlang@haynesconstruction.com and equivalent combination of experience and training substituting on a Fax or Email Questions & Bids to: Dawn Lang @ 203-881-8372 HCC encourages the participation of all Veteran,year S/W/MBE & Section 3 Certified for year basis.

MustBusinesses possess or be able to obtain within the probationary period, Haynes Construction Company, 32 Progress Seymour, 06483 a StateAve, of CT ClassCTIV Water Treatment Plant Operator’s License. Must have a valid driver’s license. Salary: $76,021 - $97,266 annually plus an excellent fringe benefit AA/EEO EMPLOYER Part Time Delivery Needed One/Two Day a Week, package. Apply: Department of Human Resources, Town of Wallingford, 45 South Must Have your Own Vehicle If Interested call Main Street, Wallingford, CT 06492. Forms will be mailed upon request from the Department of Human Resources or may be downloaded from the Department of Human Resources Web Page. The closing date will be that date the 50th application form/resume is received, or March 23, 2021, whichever occurs first. EOE

(203) 387-0354 21

THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021 INNER-CITY NEWS July 27, 2016 - August 02, 2016

Construction

Garrity Asphalt Reclaiming, Inc seeks:

Seeking to employ experienced individuals in the labor, foreman, operator and teamster Construction Equipment Mechanic preferably experienced in trades for a heavy outside work statewide. Reliable personal transportation and a valid Reclaiming and Road Milling Equipment. We offer factory drivers license required. To apply please call (860) 621-1720 or send resume to: Personnel Department, P.O. Box 368, Cheshire, CT06410. training on equipment we operate. Location: Bloomfield CT Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer M/F/V We offer excellent hourly rate & excellent benefits Drug Free Workforce VALENTINA MACRI RENTAL HOUSING PRE- APPLICATIONS AVAILABLE Contact: Tom Dunay

NOTICE

Invitation to Bid

Phone: 243-2300 HOME INC, on behalf of860Columbus House and the New Haven Housing Authority, is accepting pre-applications for studio and one-bedroom apartments at this develEmail: tom.dunay@garrityasphalt.com opment& located at 108 Frank Street, Haven. Maximum limitationsevent ap- for any interested subcontracts regarding Women Minority Applicants are New encouraged to apply incomeOutreach ply.Affi Pre-applications willEqual be available from 9AM TO 5PM beginning Monday early releaseJu;y packages is 2/26/2021 at 6 pm. Please register rmative Action/ Opportunity Employer 25, 2016 and ending when sufficient pre-applications (approximately 100) have meeting at ccpconsultingfirm.com. for Teams been received at the offices of HOME INC. Applications will be mailied upon request by calling HOME INC at 203-562-4663 during those hours.Shawmut Completed pre- & Construction, the Construction Manager, is Design Garrity Asphalt Reclaiming, Incoffices seeks: applications must be returned to HOME INC’s at 171 Orange Street, Third proposals from subcontractors for work to be currently seeking Reclaimer Operators Floor, New Haven,and CTMilling 06510.Operators with current licensing performed as part of the Southern Connecticut State University and clean driving record, be willing to travel throughout the North(SCSU) Business School Instructional Facility. The initial Early east & NY. We offer excellent hourly rate & excellent benefits Release bidding (six bid packages) is out for bid 2/22/21. This project is the out-of-ground construction of the new 64,628 sf, Contact: Rick Tousignant Phone: 860- 243-2300 four-story SCSU Business School Instruction Facility. There VALENTINA MACRI VIVIENDAS DE ALQUILER PRE-SOLICITUDES DISPONIBLES Email: rick.touare SBE set-aside bid packages for Demolition and Concrete in signant@garrityasphalt.com Early Release portion.

HOME INC, en nombre de la Columbus House y de la New Haven Housing Authority, está Women & Minority Applicants are encouraged to apply aceptando pre-solicitudes estudios y apartamentos de un dormitorio en este desarrollo For further bid details visit: https://shawmut.sharefile.com/dAffirmative Action/ para Equal Opportunity Employer ubicado en la calle 109 Frank Street, New Haven. Se aplican limitaciones de ingresos s594d1cdc9ad54d72b3399d9fe4eb5375 máximos. Las pre-solicitudes estarán disponibles 09 a.m.-5 p.m. comenzandoShawmut Martes is25an Affirmative Action/ Equal Opportunity Employer julio, 2016 hasta cuando se han recibido suficientes pre-solicitudes (aproximadamente 100) en lasTrailer oficinasDriver de HOME INC. & Las pre-solicitudes serán enviadas Tractor for Heavy Highway Construction Equip- por correo a petición llamando HOME INCLicense, al 203-562-4663 duranterecord, esas horas.Pre-solicitudes deberán remitirse ment.

Must ahave a CDL clean driving capable of a las oficinas de equipment; HOME INCbe enwilling 171 Orange Street, tercer piso, operating heavy to travel throughout theNew Haven , CT 06510 .

Northeast & NY. We offer excellent hourly rate & excellent benefits

NOTICIA

Union Company seeks:

El Programa de Vales de Elección de Vivienda (HCVP) proporciona asistencia para ayudar a las personas de bajos ingresos a pagar una vivienda de alquiler decente y segura. El Departamento de Vivienda y Desarrollo Urbano (HUD) financia el programa y Elm City Communities (ECC) lo administra en la ciudad de New Haven. Una vez que un solicitante es retirado de la lista de espera, HCVP emitirá un vale de alquiler y el solicitante será libre de ubicar una unidad de vivienda adecuada a las necesidades y deseos de la familia en el mercado de alquiler privado.

REQUERIMIENTOS: Las ganancias del hogar deben ser de entre el 0 y el 50% del ingreso medio del área (AMI) al momento en el que el nombre del solicitante sea seleccionado en la lista de espera. Consulte la tabla a continuación para conocer los requisitos específicos de ingresos y composición familiar. La posición en la lista de espera se basará en la fecha y la hora en que se reciba la solicitud para brindar acceso justo se harán adaptaciones para las solicitudes recibidas por correo o entregada en mano. Las solicitudes recibidas por correo o entregada en mano serán marcadas con la fecha y la hora que se reciban.

La lista de espera se actualizará según sea necesario para garantizar que todos los solicitantes y la información del solicitante esté actualizada y sea oportuna. Para actualizar su solicitud en línea, siga las instrucciones a continuación:

Town of Bloomfield

Contact Dana at 860-243-2300

Email: dana.briere@garrityasphalt.com Women & Minority Applicants are encouraged to apply

NEW HAVEN

# de person as en el hogar

Custodian

$23.40/hourly (benefited)

Pre-employment drug testing. AA/EOE. For Details go to www.bloomfieldct.gov

APARTMENTS FOR RENT

242-258 Fairmont Ave 2BR Townhouse, 1.5 BA, 3BR, 1 level , 1BA All new apartments, new appliances, new carpet, close to I-91 & I-95 241 highways, Quinnipiac Avenue, New Haven near bus stop & shopping center

Spacious 2 bedroom townhouses with hardwood floors. 1.5 baths. Select with basePetwasher/dryer under 40lb allowed.

Interested contact Maria 860-985-8258 ments and hookups.

On-siteparties laundry facility.

Off@street parking. Close proximity to restaurants, shopping centers and on bus line. No pets. Security deposit varies. $1,425-$1,450 includes heat, hot awater and cooking gas. Section 8 welcome.

CT. Unified Deacon’s Association is pleased to offer Deacon’s Certificate Program.

This is a 10 month program designed to assist in the intellectual formation of Candidates Call Christine 860-985-8258. in response to the Church’s Ministry needs. The cost is $125. Classes start Saturday, August 20, 2016 1:303:30 Contact: Chairman, Deacon Joe J. Davis, M.S., B.S. (203) 996-4517 Host, General Bishop Elijah Davis, D.D. Pastor of Pitts Chapel U.F.W.B. Church 64 Brewster

The Housing Authority of the City of Bridgeport

St. New Haven, CT

La Autoridad de Vivienda de la Ciudad de New Haven está actualmente aceptando aplicaciones para la lista de espera del programa de vales de elección de Vivienda (Sección 8)

Request for Proposal (RFP) UPCS Inspections and Repairs Solicitation Number: 164-AM-21-S

SEYMOUR HOUSING AUTHORITY The Housing of by the the CityHousing of Bridgeport d/b/aofPark City Communities Sealed bidsAuthority are invited Authority the Town of Seymour (PCC) currently qualifi Pre-REAC untilis3:00 pm onseeking Tuesday,proposal August from 2, 2016 at ed its contractors office at 28for Smith Street, inspections Solicitation be available on February 24, Seymour,and CT repairs.

06483 for Concrete package Sidewalkwill Repairs and Replacement at the 2021 to obtainGardens a copy Assisted of the solicitation you must send your request to bids@ Smithfield Living Facility, 26 Smith Street Seymour. parkcitycommunities.org, please reference solicitation number and title on the subject line. A Pre-proposal conference call will be conducted on March 11, 2021 A pre-bid conference will be held at the Housing Authority Office 28 Smith @ 10:00 a.m. via conference call. Although attendance is not mandatory, submitStreet Seymour, CT at 10:00 am, Wednesday,conference July 20, 2016. ting a proposal without attending theon pre-proposal call may not be in the best interest of the Offeror. Additional questions should be emailed only to Bidding documents are available fromthan the March Seymour bids@parkcitycommunities.org no later 17,Housing 2021 @ Authority 3:00 p.m. OfAnswers the questions will be posted on PCC’s www.parkcitycomfice,to28allSmith Street, Seymour, CT 06483 (203)Website: 888-4579. munities.org. Proposals shall be e-mailed, mailed, or hand delivered by March 24,The 2021 @ 3:00Authority p.m., to reserves Ms. Caroline Sanchez, Director of Procurement, Housing the right to accept or reject any or all bids,150 to Highland Bridgeport, CT 06604. or bids@parkcitycommunities.org. reduce Ave, the scope of the project to reflect available funding, and to waive Late any proposals will not be accepted.

informalities in the bidding, if such actions are in the best interest of the Housing Authority.

Maxim o

1

$35, 950

2

$41, 050

3

4

$46, 200

$51, 300

5

$55, 450

6

$59, 550

7

$63, 650

Aplicaciones se pueden someter o actualizadas:

•

En línea a https://ecc.myhousing.com/

• Si requiere una acomodacion razonable y quiere recibir una aplicación FIREFIGHTER 2nd Noticepor correo por favor llamar al 475-355-7289 o envié una petición por City of Bristol con atención: Waitlist Coordinator, Elm City Communities, PO BOX SAYEBROOKE escrito VILLAGE

Invitation to Bid:

1912, New Haven CT 06509

Old Saybrook, CT Units) $53,964/yr. (4 Buildings, 17Las aplicaciones recibidas por correo serán basada en un sistema de lotería.

TaxCPAT ExemptCert & Not Prevailing Wage Rate Project Requires valid issued on or after June 1, 2020, Si usted necesita acomodación razonable para completar su aplicación llame al 203-498-8800 ext. 1507 New Construction, Wood Framed, Housing, Selective Demolition, Site-work, Castwritten & oral tests.

Registration in-place information & applyConcrete, online: Asphalt Shingles, Vinyl Siding, Las aplicaciones están Casework, actualmente disponible. La lista de espera permanecerá Flooring, Painting, Division 10 Specialties, Appliances, Residential www.bristolct.gov abierta.

Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing and Fire Protection.

ThisDEADLINE: contract is subject state set-aside and contract compliance requirements.

May 1,to2021

State of Connecticut

Bid Extended, Due Date: August 5, 2016 Office of Policy and Management Anticipated Start: August 15, 2016 Seeking qualified condidates Project to fill numerous vacanciesavailable via ftp link below: documents to include, Benefits & Pension Coordinator and more. For The State of Connecticut, Office of Policy and Management is recruiting for a http://ftp.cbtghosting.com/loginok.html?username=sayebrookevillage information and detailed application instructions, visit

CITY OF MILFORD

Leadership Associate (target class Agency Labor Relations Specialist) and an Information Technology Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary, OPM position.

www.ci.milford.ct.us

Click on Email SERVICES, JOBS&and Fax or Questions BidsJOB to: TITLE. Dawn Lang @ 203-881-8372 dawnlang@haynesconstruction.com

QSR

Further information regarding HCC encourages the participation of all Veteran, S/W/MBE & Section 3 Certified Businessesthe duties, eligibility requirements and application instructions are available at: Haynes Construction Company, 32 Progress Ave, Seymour, CT 06483 STEEL CORPORATION https://www.jobapscloud.com/CT/sup/bulpreview.asp?R1= AA/EEO EMPLOYER

APPLY NOW!

Steel Fabricators, Erectors & Welders Top pay for top performers. Health Benefits, 401K, Vacation Pay. Email Resume: Rose@qsrsteel.com Hartford, CT AFFIRMATIVE ACTION/EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER

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210217&R2=5989VR&R3=001 and

https://www.jobapscloud.com/CT/sup/bulpreview.asp?R1= 210217&R2=5571MP&R3=001 The State of Connecticut is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer and strongly encourages the applications of women, minorities, and persons with disabilities.

THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

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THE INNER-CITY NEWS - March 03, 2021 - March 09, 2021

Thinking about the vaccine?

We put our best minds on it to ensure its safety.

At Yale New Haven Health, we’re not only proud to offer this long-awaited COVID-19 vaccine to the general public, we’re proud to have led the way worldwide with Yale School of Medicine when it comes to ensuring its safety and efficacy. Learn more about the vaccine and how, when, and where to get yours at ynhhs.org/covidvaccine.

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