The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Symbols, names hold emotional power
History long hidden beginning to emerge
A statue comes down. A window is smashed. Army bases’ names come under attack.
Names and symbols have emotional power, and sometimes what they represent fails to reveal the whole record. People whose history has gone untold or been misrepresented are demanding their place in the history books and in the public square.
“Symbols do not tell the entire story, and what’s happening now is people want to know the entire story,” said Jayuan Carter, an African-American resident of New Haven who has been named to the Civilian Review Board that will investigate complaints of police misconduct.
While Christopher Columbus long was seen as a hero to Italian Americans, to people of color a statue of Christopher Columbus represents European oppression and enslavement of the native people, Carter said. The message is, “Hey, your part of the story does not matter. Your part of the story is not told because it’s not victory to them, even though it’s part of the story,” he said.
But the removal of some of those symbols is painful to those who look on them as representing their heritage.
To those Italian Americans whose families settled in Wooster Square, the statue represents a heritage of arriving in a new country, learning the language and working hard to create a better life for their children, said Patricia Cofrancesco, whose grandparents immigrated to New Haven.
“When they came over from very humble beginnings, no one spoke the language and they were met with the same discrimination that folks today are complaining about,” said Cofrancesco, an East Haven lawyer who represents the ItalianAmerican Heritage Group of New Haven. The group asked for an injunction to prevent the statue’s removal, which has yet to be heard.
“My paternal grandfather was a blacksmith” who owned a shop on Greene Street in 1911 and built wagon and truck bodies, Cofrancesco said. That company survives as Alton Truck Body and Trailer Inc. in East Haven, she said. Her maternal grandfather, Matteo Carrano, owned a Chapel Street market that her grandmother, Anna, ran after he fell ill.
“They wanted a better life and they struggled, they truly, truly struggled,” she said. “The one thing that was instilled in us was, we want you to have a better life than we did.”
Columbus’ statue was erected “without anybody knowing or being aware of what the good, the bad and the ugly was about,” Cofrancesco said. To them, the Italian explorer “represented something they could be proud of. He was one of us, look what he did. … Sure, Columbus is taking a real hit right now, no doubt about it, and perhaps justifiably so. But that statue has significance for a different reason.”
It represented “all the hopes and dreams and aspirations” of the Italian immigrants, she said.
“Speaking for myself, I think it was incredibly sad” when the statue was removed, she said. “I think it was incredibly disrespectful to move it.”
But for Black residents of the city, the statue represented only a part of the history of the neighborhood.
“Wooster Square was actually constructed by a Black man. That’s not part of the story,” Carter said. “It’s a part of the story that should be told. … Nobody is better than the other. We all built this together.”
A sit-in was held Friday seeking to rename Wooster Square Park in honor of William Lanson, a successful Black businessman who developed what was then called the New Township, where many African Americans lived in the early 19th century, according to connecticuthistory.org. He was a successful businessman and responsible for constructing an extension to Long Wharf.
Wooster Square was named for a Revolutionary War general who was born in Stratford and fatally wounded and buried in Danbury. His fame in New Haven stems from his reluctance to hand over the keys to the gunpower stores to Capt. Benedict Arnold, who wanted to march to Lexington to fight the British in 1775. The day is commemorated each year in New Haven as Powder House Day.
“A lot of the stuff that’s happening is about equity,” Carter said. “You have people who say your value is not good enough to claim equity.” When a name or symbol represents only one part of history, the others feel they are made invisible.
Calhoun to Grace Hopper
Columbus is the most recent white man to be the target of protests in New Haven. But in 2016, Vice President John C. Calhoun, an avowed racist and slaveowner, was the focus of protests because a residential college at Yale University was named for him. Community members joined Yale students, staff and alumni in demanding the name of the college be changed. In February 2017, Yale President Peter Salovey announced the college would be renamed for Grace Hopper, a Navy admiral and computer scientist.
The college, built in the 1930s, portrayed Calhoun in images of his life and the antebellum South in portraits and stained-glass windows. On June 13, 2016, Corey Menafee, a dining hall worker, smashed one of the windows, which showed enslaved workers in a cotton field. He resigned, was given his job back and now holds a higherlevel position in Yale’s dining halls.
Menafee said he had not thought much of the Calhoun imagery until a Black alumnus and his young daughter visited and the alumnus pointed out the windows. “It kind of broke my heart,” he said. “I didn’t want anyone to come and see that image again.”
He said he never felt angry about the image but the idea ate at him. “You know that feeling of somebody behind you, staring at you? It was like in the back of my subconscious. In the forefront of my brain, I’m working, doing things.”
Menafee said racism is something he’s learned to live with, from a one-paragraph description of Africa in school to white people stepping out into the street rather than walking past him on the sidewalk.
He said he thinks the Columbus controversy is “some kind of power struggle … because of George Floyd. It’s the combination of all of that together. It blew up. People are tired of it. … When white people get tired of it, that’s when things change.”
George Floyd’s killing May 25 by a white police officer launched weeks of protests and the Black Lives Matter movement grew and began to focus on statues of Confederate generals, Confederate battle flags and Columbus, whose own journals record atrocities against the Arawak natives.
Calls have been issued for military bases named for Confederate generals to be renamed, including Henry Benning, Braxton Bragg and John Bell Hood. U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, both D-Conn., have sponsored a bill in the Senate that would rename any such military installation within three years.
‘A full human being’
Kica Matos, a community organizer and one of five proprietors of the New Haven Green, said the events since Floyd’s death represent “a moment of reckoning for the nation … that we never see another Black man killed by a police officer.” There is a direct line from the racism that results in such killings back to Columbus’ legacy, she said. “He’s somebody who didn’t see somebody like me as a full human being.”
Matos said “statues and monuments have always been part of a movement.” Referring to the statues of Confederate generals in the South, “they were part of a Southern narrative and they were messages of white pride.” Many were erected in the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan was rising and Southerners wanted to portray their loss in the Civil War as a heroic struggle rather than a treasonous act.
Matos, who was born in Puerto Rico, said that as a Latina woman, “every time I saw a Confederate flag I froze in terror. I think about white supremacy and I think about violence.”
She said white people who defend such symbols should ask themselves, “If you know for a fact that the symbols you’re upholding terrorize people of color, why wouldn’t you choose something else?”
The Rev. Kelcy Steele, pastor of Varick Memorial AME Zion Church, said Columbus and Confederate symbols are triggers for people of color. Seeing a rebel flag “takes you all the way back to slavery and the plantation and these are wounds that haven’t been healed,” he said.
Steele, who was asked to come to Wooster Square on Wednesday to maintain peace when the Columbus statue was removed, said statues are just symbols. “You can take down a statue, you can rename a school, but you can’t remove the racism from (a) person’s heart,” he said.
“It’s a good step, it’s a small win, it’s a breath of fresh air that we’re taking,” Steele said. But he added, “We have not really healed from slavery. We have not felt like America or others have acknowledged the bloodshed and the pain that our ancestors faced.” In defending portrayals of slaveowners, “It seems like oppression is outranking liberation,” Steele said.
Honoring African Americans also can feel like a hollow symbol without real change, Steele said. Martin Luther King Boulevard “reminds me of how guilty the conscience is of a nation that assassinated him,” he said. “It’s not in the signs and the symbols. It’s in the heart of the believer.”
Honoring ancestors
Vincent Mauro Jr., the Democratic Town Committee chairman in New Haven, was one of a group of Italian-Americans and others who called for the Columbus statue to be removed. He said the attachment to Columbus is “a generational thing.”
“For people in my generation, my Italian-American heritage and culture comes from people like my grandmother, who was a war bride. Tina Cavallaro ran a market in Branford’s Indian Neck section for more than 50 years, Mauro said. His grandfather was George Cavallaro.
“I understand people who look to Columbus as that symbol” of ItalianAmerican pride, he said. “I don’t look to Columbus as the Italian-American symbol.” Instead, he looks to his ancestors, “people who came here with nothing” and succeeded “through hard work, but maintaining the culture and traditions they grew up with.”
“She became an American citizen,” Mauro said of his “nonnie.” “She was proud to be an American. Her hero wasn’t Columbus.”
Columbus, and those who donated the statue to the city in 1892, don’t reflect the experiences of his grandparents, Mauro said. “When they put that statue up 130 years ago … that Greatest Generation didn’t exist.”
He said, though, that he understands the attachment. “All that I feel about my grandmother and grandfather, they feel about that statue and that name. Their association is to that,” he said. “They see Columbus the same way I see my grandmother.”
Glorifying oppression
Amanda Moras, an associate professor of sociology at Sacred Heart University, said Columbus “is a triggering name for people. … I think for lots of folks, especially people who are marginalized, the glorification of these people really speaks to a violent and oppressed history that is traumatic and harmful and is celebrated. For some folks, Columbus evokes a really deep history of violence.”
Moras said the symbols that are harmful to marginalized groups “are held up as some deep understanding of history that we can’t let go of.
“Those same people who want to hold onto some of that history are the same people that want to deny or gloss over that same history,” which includes slavery, Moras said. “Ultimately, I think it’s that same kind of idea of who’s telling history. Why do we celebrate heroes that do harm?”