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NORTH HAVEN — Youth organizers gathered at North Haven High School to rally against racism and to advocate for change in their schools and to defund police, despite facing continuous opposition throughout a march to the police department.
Siobhan Ekeh, of CT Against Brutality, an organization of students in the New Haven area, helped kick off the event Tuesday afternoon.
Ekeh, a Milford resident, had been asked to help organize the rally by former NHHS student Molly Duffy, who described the North Haven community as unwelcoming toward people of minority groups, pointing toward a Jeep flying American and Blue Lives Matter flags.
As the protesters assembled at the school, people opposing the demonstration gathered in the parking lot and later followed in vehicles the group of mostly students marching on foot to the police station.
Speaking to approximately 40 young activists, which included current and former NHHS students, Ekeh tried to encourage non-Black people to understand what it is like to live as a Black American.
“What would it feel like if the entire world was not made for you?” she said.
In the hours that followed, demonstrators called for widespread change, both in educational systems and police institutions.
Several youth shared experiences of racism and discrimination in the North Haven school system, saying they had been the targets of racial and homophobic slurs from their peers.
One speaker, Diego Esponda, identified himself as a Hispanic student in North Haven and member of the LGBTQ+ community. He said he had experienced homophobia and racism in class.
“There are days when I’m afraid to go to school,” he said.
Esponda called for the school system to incorporate discussions about race and sexuality into curricula, starting early in a child’s education and continuing to graduation.
Amy Nichols, a recent Yale University graduate who said she moved to the area about four years ago, spoke out against the NHHS mascot, the “Indians.”
The term “Indians,” Nichols pointed out, comes from Christopher Columbus’s false belief that he landed in India.
“The term that is used for the North Haven mascot is an artificial grouping based in racist stereotypes,” she said.
Nichols identified herself as a member of the Samish Nation, a Native American tribe headquartered in Washington state.
She also called for curricula at schools in North Haven and across the country to incorporate more Native American history, calling the lack of education on the matter an “erasure” of indigenous history.
Shortly after 5 p.m., the group left the school and headed along Elm Street to the police station, chanting “Black lives matter” and “no justice, no peace, no racist police.”
Organizers continued to explain their mission and motivation on the steps of the department. Ekeh said they aren’t against individual officers, but that the policing system doesn’t work for Black and brown people.
The activists are interested in reallocating the millions of dollars in the police budget toward community and educational resources, she said.
A group of people wearing American flags and related apparel watched them as they left the school parking lot.
“You soul-less animals,” one yelled.
Some got in cars and on motorcycles to follow the marchers as an unmarked police car separated the two groups.
At the station, the same people standing in opposition to the demonstration lingered across the road on Linsley Street.
But not every observer was against the march.
One woman came out of her house as she saw the demonstrators pass. Keeping some distance from the crowd, she walked alongside them to the police station.
It’s “so good to see this,” said Olga Dominicci Bower, a 70-year-old North Haven resident who said she participated in civil rights marches in New York in the 1960s.
“To see young people … there’s hope,” she said. “Our hope is in these young people.”
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