New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Elicker offers apology for treatment of former slave
New Haven’s mayor declares Sept. 26 William Lanson Day
NEW HAVEN — For the “humiliations, discrimination, and false accusations” against the freed slave who helped lay the foundation for economic success in 19th century New Haven, Mayor Justin Elicker Saturday apologized as the newly installed image of William Lanson stood behind him.
“You have been wronged by us and as much as we can, we wish to make it right,” Elicker said, declaring Sept. 26 William Lanson Day. For any municipal charges falsely brought against the selftaught engineer, Elicker offered a pardon.
A bronze statue in Lanson’s honor, created by sculptor Dana King, was unveiled on land along the Farmington Canal where Lanson in 1825 was contracted to put in the basin wall. He first established his credentials by successfully extending Long Wharf pier 1,350 feet to accommodate larger vessels so the city could compete with New York and Boston.
The unveiling climaxed a two-hour ceremony sponsored by the Amistad Committee on a plot of land along what is now the Farmington Heritage Trail that brought the past and the future together and recognized the people who worked for seven years to champion a statue on that site, making visible a piece of New Haven history known to relatively few.
Lanson, who as born around 1782, built housing and hotels in Wooster Square, ran a carriage business and owned a quarry, in addition to his engineering work. He employed and housed runaway and freed slaves and was successful until historians say racism reasserted itself that ended in a series of arrests that left him penniless.
Elicker said the American Colonization Society flourished in his lifetime in its “spiteful rhetoric,” calling for the removal of free Black men back to Africa. He said it was then that local authorities worked hard to “take away his (Lanson’s) financial resources, at times his freedom, and to tarnish his good name.”
The mayor, like others, said the city had an obligation to tell Lanson’s story as part of undoing the “system of inequalities and racism” that continue to harm American society.
King, when she took the microphone, first remembered the land stolen from tribes in the region, as she “honored the blood that was spilled in order for us to be here.”
King then thanked Elicker for “the courage that it took to liberate the spirit of William Lanson by apologizing for the harms done and by pardoning him. That apology is one that should ring through this nation on behalf of Black descendants who built this country ... I pray that others follow in your footsteps and do the same.”
The sculptor said Black people over the centuries have been “controlled by everyone ... objectified, beaten, hung and hated. We are appreciated for a few things. For our athleticism, for our musical talent, for our beauty.
“But we are watched and we are hunted - George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Mike Brown - a list that is endless, relegated to the painful annals of history for being a Black body,” she said.
King said she creates
“Black bodies in bronze to reclaim agency.”
The sculptor said she gave Lanson a scar to recognize the dangerous physical work he did, but also his psychic pain. She said in her research she found that Lanson was a “faithful man” whose church “still stands today.” He helped form the Temple Street Church, now the Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ.
King said, in creating this sculpture, she wanted to celebrate his successes as well as incorporate what was “heart wrenching.”
“Black bodies in bronze can no longer be hurt . ... There is no more running. There is no more tears. There is no more heartache. Black bodies in bronze exist to tell the story of triumph, of winning, of existence beyond measure. They are a journey through time, revealing the excellence of their lives,” King told the quiet crowd.
She declared: “Mr. Lanson is home, he is back home.”
King said she was grateful for a man who extended his service to New Haven, bringing wealth to the community, touching all lives, providing jobs and pride to African descendants.
The site will eventually be further landscaped and feature a timeline and seating areas. The base is designed so people can climb on it and touch the statue. “I want you to love him. I want you to hug him. I want you to protect him.” King told the crowd of about 100.
“Please bring your children ... to meet Mr. Lanson and to commune with him ... Listen to him. He is you. He is us. He is New Haven,” King said.
The planning for the statue started in the administration of Mayor Toni Harp who was recognized for her contribution that went back to 2014 with dedication of the site as it awaited the statue and for her help with these issues through her tenure of more than two decades in the state legislature.
She thanked Al Marder, 98, the longtime chairman of the Amistad Committee that not only planned for the statue of Lanson, but started the Connecticut Freedom Trail, and the building of the monument to the Amistad event, where captured Africans won their freedom in Connecticut courts in the mid-19th century and then in the Supreme Court.
The statute of Lanson faces the Grove Street Cemetery where some of the people on the Amistad are buried.
“How many children in Connecticut, and frankly in the United States, have heard about this?” Harp asked and spoke of the importance of teaching them such history.
Harp said Lanson was a man who was not educated in a formal way, “but was just talented. How often do we have to fight today to get people to think that African Americans, who are educated, are talented?” she said to clapping from the crowd.
The former mayor brought the event into the present when she referred to current political events.
“We have a president who engages in tribalism, in many respects, and has us pitted one against another,” Harp said. She said racism “has erupted beyond what was always there.” The 50th mayor of the city and the first woman said the country “has ignored and not dealt with what we are.” She said it would be different if we had proclaimed we were a totalitarian society.
“We allow tribalism, we allow racism to interfere with the way in which we govern,” Harp said. She urged everyone “to rededicate ourselves to becoming the America that we say we are, to show the world that we can become more than a group of tribes ... we got to fight for freedom. It is easy to snuggle up to our tribes to be comfortable with the people we were born with. We have to teach ourselves that we are one human race,” she said.
U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd, echoed the other speakers on the injustices Lanson suffered. “(He) ultimately faced defamation and destitution from a white majority that used its levers of state power to put him into ruin. But today we return him to his rightful and honorable place in the history of our town.”
Marder said the honoring of Lanson is happening in a “tumultuous time” in America
where millions are marching and protesting against
“the curse of racism that plagued our country for 400 years.”
In addition to everything that New Haven is learning about Lanson, Marder said he also organized unsuccessfully the first Black college in New Haven. He fought for jury trials for run-away slaves and he was elected Black governor of Connecticut for five terms. Marder said the people of
New Haven were central to the struggle for freedom for Blacks in the 19th century that was not decided until the Civil War.
Alder Jeanette Morrison, D-22, in whose ward the memorial is situated, told Marder: “Al, you are the bomb . ... Al is constantly pushing the envelope, educating us.” She got a promise from the education system to put Lanson in the history curriculum. She reiterated Elicker’s pardon, pointing out that Lanson had to wait almost 200 years for his second chance.
David Blight, director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University said the story is crying out to become a film to reach that larger audience. “Where are the screenwriters?” he asked the crowd.
“Today is a day you can breathe in a little history. It is a day when history is all around you. The past and the presence are sometimes like hand in glove,” Blight said.
Quoting from poet Robert Penn Warren he said “History. It’s the thing you cannot resign from.”
Blight said it is the thing that “you can’t get away from it. You can’t walk away from it. It will come. It will find you.”
Quoting from James Baldwin,
he said: “History is not just something you read ...
The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us. We are consciously controlled by it and history is literally present in all that we do.”
But Blight said “it is only present if you know it. It is only present if you faced it. It is only present if you stare it down.”
He said Frederick Douglas, writing in 1869, said America was a country “of all extremes, of ends and opposites, the most conspicuous example of composite nationality the world has ever seen.”
“We talk all the time about diversity, inequity and inclusion,” Blight said, “Douglas’ composite nation speech reads like a far more eloquent version of all the diversity statements we write today and it was 150 years ago. It reads like a multi-cultural manifesto in a school district in the 1990s ... What we are talking about isn’t new,”
Blight said.
Ending with another Douglas quote, Blight brought the dedication back to the present, reciting the last sentence from Douglas’s “My Bondage and My Freedom.”
“We will never forget my humble origins, nor refuse, while heaven allows me ability to use my voice, my pen and my vote,” Douglas, who had grown-up a slave in Maryland, said.
“We don’t all have the pen. Not everybody can write an op-ed somewhere. Not everybody can write a book, but we all have a voice. We all have a vote. My voice, my pen, my vote,” Blight concluded to cheers from the audience.