In the portal held by Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s hands, there are several silhouettes representing different organizing efforts across New Haven. One small illustration represents the Citywide Youth Coalition’s (CWYC) walkout of the city’s high schools to demand police-free schools and investment in real mental health support, calling for more counselors and social workers over cops. CWYC has also organized marches, rallies, and teach-ins alongside Black Lives Matter New Haven calling to defund the police and instead invest in public education and affordable housing. Their demands included “moving $30 million from the police budget into the public schools, replacing school resource officers with counselors, and ending the city’s “triple occupation” by the New Haven Police Department, Yale Police Department, and Hamden Police Department.” Read more here.

“Members of CWYC, including Remsen Welsh, Lihame Arouna, Mellody Massaquoi, Jamila Washington and Jeremy Cajigas led the march.

"Thinking about people who have been brutalized by the police, or have been killed by the police and can't speak for themselves now that they've passed ... we are here to be the speakers of this movement," said Welsh.” Read more here. / Lucy Gellman Photos.

Students marching downtown as part of CWYC’s walkout. People hold signs reading “Care Not Cops,” “Police Free Schools,” and “Listen to Students.” / Nora Grace-Flood Photos

• New Haven Independent article on walkout linked here

• CWYC’s principles and complete list of demands linked here

• From A Black, Indigenous, and Latinx Peoples’ History of New Haven and CWYC.org : Located just off of the Green in downtown New Haven, the Black and Brown Power Center houses CWYC, “a nonprofit organization focused on youth-led, peer-led organizing.” Since 1976, CWYC has been organizing around and providing “a free breakfast program, expanded summer programming, and more comprehensive transportation for students.” Today, CWYC holds weekly Radical Wisdom and Revolutionary programming, and during the summer months, Black and Brown Queer Camp and Citywide Abolition Bootcamps.

The silhouettes also represent a student walkout in 2018 for an immigrant father, Nelson Pinos. Over 250 students from Wilbur Cross, Common Ground and James Hiillhouse High Schools and Yale and Southern Connecticut State Universities (SCSU) marched with 300 sanctuary city advocates, members of Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA), and faith leaders to First & Summerfield United Methodist Church. In the basement of this church, Pinos had been in sanctuary for 281 days at the time. In 2021 (now after more than 1330 days in sanctuary) Pinos won a one-year stay of deportation from the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Read more here and here.

Student Power walkout for Pinos in 2018 / Lucy Gellman Photos

The silhouettes also include March for Our Schools in 2022, where parents, teachers, and school workers protested for more funding for public schools to respond to the staffing shortage crisis. Echoing the demands of the CWYC, they called for investment in our youth and in education instead of more funding for the police. Read more here.

Lastly, while not represented in the silhouettes, it is crucial to acknowledge the work of the Intergenerational Abolitionist Project and its contributions to this mural. Nataliya Braginsky, a former Metropolitan Business Academy teacher who is a founding member of ARTLC, ran the project and its book club/working group out of Possible Futures. She did this with James Hillhouse High School senior Elsa Holahan; their work, paired with the Black, Indigenous, and Latinx studies curriculum Braginsky helped create for and alongside NHPS students, became the core of the mural project.