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At CT State Gateway, A New Home For Equity and Social Justice

Lucy Gellman | January 28th, 2025

At CT State Gateway, A New Home For Equity and Social Justice

Culture & Community  |  Downtown  |  Arts & Culture  |  Arts & Anti-racism  |  Education  |  Gateway Community College

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Top: Melton and McAvay (at center) cut the ribbon on the center. Bottom: Attendees, many of whom spoke, admire the space. Powell, who delivered the keynote, is pictured in the plaid coat. Lucy Gellman Photos. 

Lift up LGBTQIA+ voices, even and especially when Washington has turned its back on them. Champion immigrants and refugees, from access to education to chances for professional development. Bridge the gender gap from classrooms to board rooms, where women may still be missing their 33 cents on every dollar. 

Name the oppression. Believe women. Throw out the master's tools. Build a better way forward—together. 

That mission is front and center at the Melton McAvay Center for Equity and Social Justice (CESJ), a new human rights hub and social justice sanctuary at CT State Gateway in downtown New Haven. The second-floor space will center programming around anti-racism, women's and LGBTQIA+ rights, immigrant and refugee rights, and educational equity. That includes scholarships for students who might not otherwise have access to a college education.

It is the product of a $300,000 gift from partners Ruby Melton and Gail McAvay, who have become fierce champions of social justice across greater New Haven, particularly in the arts and education. In a two-hour unveiling ceremony last Thursday, speakers championed it as more vital and necessary than ever, particularly as Donald Trump begins a second presidential term with sweeping rollbacks on basic human rights. 

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"Your presence here today says to us that although DEI programs are being rolled back, although immigrants and refugees are threatened with closed borders and mass deportations, and although bodily autonomy for trans people and women are reserved for the privileged and the rich, those are not our shared values," said Melton as McAvay stood by her side, as she has for over four decades. "Because you are here today, we know you share our values. We are together in this struggle."

The center, which Melton and McAvay have dreamed about for years, revolves around “four pillars,” including gender equity, racial, ethnic and social justice, LGBTQIA+ Pride, and creating a safe and welcoming home for dreamers (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA recipients), immigrants, and refugees. As its inaugural director, Professor Licella Arboleda has planned a listening tour of community partners and instituted a “campus climate committee” to ensure robust programming moving forward. 

For Arboleda, it’s personal: she was born in the Hill and grew up in Fair Haven, before attending Gateway herself as a first-generation college student. 

In addition, it will be a common touchpoint for several of CT State Gateway’s affinity groups, including the college’s Black Professional Affinity Group and UNIDOS, the college’s Hispanic, Latine, Afro-Latino and Indigenous Professional Affinity Group. 

“My priority, and the priority of leadership on campus, is to really center the work we're doing around the four pillars,” said Arboleda. “We’re working on creating a center that is focused around our community and really coming together as one.”

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Ibrahim: "The work isn’t easy, but the impact is profound—just as the work of this center will be.”

Thursday evening, that heart-forward mission could not have seemed more at odds with the news coming out of Washington, where Trump had already signed a flurry of executive orders attacking trans rights, protections for immigrants, birthright citizenship, and federal diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI initiatives (more orders, including those halting refugee arrivals, freezing foreign and federal aid, and reinstituting the global gag rule, came over the weekend and on Monday). As speaker after speaker took the mic, each stressed the need for solidarity and cross-cultural bridge building at a time when the president seeks to take away both. 

Addressing the audience early in the evening, CT State Gateway student Nuha Ibrahim remembered coming to the U.S. in 2008, and feeling  blindsided by “systems that were not built with people like me in mind.” For years, she did her best to navigate her new home, building a family in the process. While she dreamed of completing an education, the average cost of a college tuition was prohibitive. 

Then she discovered Gateway. While also raising two sons, Ibrahim declared a major in social and criminal justice, and set her sights on eventually transferring to Southern Connecticut State University. “I felt seen, supported, believed in,” she remembered Thursday. As she excelled in her studies, she found a network of academic and financial support that helped her power through. Melton and McAvay have been part of that; Ibrahim was awarded a CESJ fellowship that will help her complete her studies. 

The center now ensures “that equality isn’t just a concept, it’s a practice,” she said. Outside of the classroom, she worked to build community with other immigrant women in New Haven, including in her role as an employment specialist at Havenly’s cafe and training program on Temple Street. Like her studies, “the work isn’t easy, but the impact is profound—just as the work of this center will be.”

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PROUD Academy’s Patricia Nicolari echoed that message as she took the mic, her voice rising as she cheered on the center. Born and raised in rural Connecticut, Nicolari remembered being just 12 years old the first time she was aware of discrimination in her backyard, and the need to name and quash it wherever possible. In her neighborhood, a house was on sale, and she watched curiously as white neighbors came out onto their porches to surveil a Black family that was looking at the property. She had never seen anything like it—and didn’t understand what was happening until her mother explained it.

Back then, Nicolari didn’t have words like redlining and discrimination in her wheelhouse—but she could sense that something wasn’t right, she said Thursday. It was the same gut feeling she had years later, when she realized that she had received pushback because she was an out lesbian. Years later, she’s trying to create safer environments through PROUD, Connecticut’s first LGBTQ+ charter school (the acronym stands for Proudly Respecting Our Unique Differences). Just last year, it received approval from the Connecticut Board of Education. 

“We are simply yearning for liberty and justice for all,” she said. 

Juancarlos Soto, an early CESJ community partner and executive director of the New Haven Pride Center, added that the Melton McAvay Center for Equity and Social Justice already plays a vital role in letting people know that they are welcome and accepted just as they are. Speaking just hours before defending LGBTQ+ rights citywide, Soto thanked Melton and McAvay for their vocal support of those often pushed to the margins. Like the city he now calls home, he sees the space as a sanctuary, as sacred and extraordinary in its mission as any soul-nourishing house of worship.

“Places like this remind us of the power of unity and the power of shared vision in community,” he said. “Your efforts will ripple far beyond this space.”

“Are You With Me Out There?” 

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That sense of community flowed through a keynote address from poet and activist Kevin Powell, who spoke on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. just days after community groups spent Monday making sure the day belonged to him. Almost seven decades after King’s murder, he still comes back to the same question, inspired by King’s long and profound footprint. It is not only What are you doing for others, which King himself asked during his lifetime, but also What kind of person do you want to be?

For Powell, who now travels the country as a speaker and artist, the answer goes all the way back to his childhood in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he was raised by a young single mother who advocated for her son, regardless of the obstacles that she was up against. Long before he was close with the late bell hooks or worked with the playwright V (formerly Eve Ensler), it was his mom who became his first role model. 

She was and is the most influential leader he has ever known, despite an eighth grade education and a country that did not want to see her succeed, he said. Before Powell was born, his mother and her sister had migrated from South Carolina, sharing a bed in a single room because it was all they could afford. Like many Black people who moved North during the Great Migration, she worked in positions that barely let her scrape by. Her education, which racism had cut short, afforded her neither social nor professional mobility for most of her life. 

As he grew up in her care, Powell—like King, and his advisor Bayard Rustin, and writer James Baldwin in his searing and prescient writing on America—recognized that poverty was a profound and insidious form of violence, linked to the evils of racism, classism, militarism and capitalism. Powell still brings that with him when he takes the podium to speak. 

“One of the things I think about as we have this moment of ‘What is going to happen to us?’ — my mother could have gave up,” he said, recalling how he got his name from the woman up the street, who became his godmother. “When she gave birth to me, y’all, she literally had to call a taxi cab. This Black woman who had to deal with racism and sexism and classicism her entire life … we had to survive.”

“My mother would say to me, ‘I need you to go further in life than I did,’” he continued. “I need you to get the education I didn’t get. I need you to make something of yourself. Are y’all with me out there?”

Years later, Powell still thinks about the matriarchs who nurtured him, with a steady and loving hand that ultimately got him to Rutgers University. In high school, his English teacher—Ms. Lillian Williams, who he remembers to this day—encouraged him to double down on his talent as a writer, giving him a push forward in a field that he loved. It was in her classroom that he discovered Black writers like Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes and Henry Dumas for the first time, each of them a revelation. 

“The fundamental question we need to ask ourselves and challenge people on, no matter who they are …the question is, what kind of human being do you want to be?” he asked, looking around the room for a moment. “What kind of human being do you want to be? What do you want to do if you see something happening that is unjust, unequitable?”

It’s that question, he continued, that also makes him think about the importance of resource distribution and the need to share power and privilege, instead of consolidating it in the hands of the few. When Powell was still a teenager, he was able to attend college through something called the Educational Opportunity Fund, a college scholarship program spearheaded by then-freshman state legislator Thomas Kean. 

Kean was white, and a beneficiary of generational wealth, Powell remembered. When he was working on legislation to start the fund, he had no way of knowing that it would give Powell—and thousands of other poor kids in the state, many of them Black and Latono—a vital seat at the educational table. Decades later, Powell was honored to speak at a 50th anniversary recognition of the fund. 

In the Melton McAvay Center for Equity and Social Justice, he sees that same window to access.

“Because y’all care, you saved a life,” he said. “You changed a life. Y’all with me out there? That’s why this center matters. That’s why this place matters.”

It’s a mission that could not be more important right now, he said. In the new administration’s attempt to seize power—and penalize those who are often most vulnerable—he sees a manifestation of pure evil (“if you’re of the devil, as we say in the Black church,” he said to knowing, soft laughter that rippled through the room). In the face of that evil, he told the room, it is necessary not to give up. It is necessary to recognize that “some fights have to be fought over and over again.”

“Dr. King warned us, don’t be selfish,” he said. “Practice a dangerous kind of selflessness. That’s what y’all are doing. Y’all could be like, ‘We made it. We good.’ But in the spirit of Harriet Tubman, y’all got to go back and get some other people.” The room exploded into applause. 

“It’s emotionally, intellectually immature to get stuck in Democrat-Republican,” he continued. “What kind of human being do you want to be? And if you really love your country, if you’re really patriotic, how can you be in the country and see people suffering from coast to coast?”

He looked to the history of race and racism and immigration in the United States, lambasting those who came from immigrant parents and grandparents, and now turn their noses up at those seeking refuge and asylum in this country. He jumped from the phenomenon of immigrants “becoming” white to the number of people who voted for Donald Trump against their own best interests, despite his promise to gut social services on which they rely. 

His voice steady, he reflected on the grace and resilience of Black people, who have persevered despite a country that has continued to put their lives at risk and treat them as less than. He paid homage to a cousin, Rev. Clementa Carlos Pinckney, who died in the white supremacist attack on Charleston’s Emanuel American Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015.    

Then, turning his attention back towards the audience, he encouraged them to channel Melton and McAvay, from organizing against injustice to sharing resources when and where they are plentiful. That collective action, for him, is an antidote to the ignorance and despair that are both palpable right now/   

“Enough of this Democratic, Republican, liberal, conservative,” he said. “That’s child’s play. That’s child’s play. Have the courage to say, ‘What kind of human being are you going to be?’ Do you care about anyone but yourself?”

“I have hope, because we have each other here,” he said, calling on attendees to educate their peers and colleagues, before ending his address. “But we’ve gotta do some work, y’all.”

A Dream Realized

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Classmates Arianna Davis and Tiana Jackson.

That spirit is evident in the space itself, where student artwork peeks out from nearly every corner and bright light fills a hallway and large, open alcove, making it feel prepped and ready for visitors. In the space, chairs and couches wait for attendees; there’s an invitation to take a seat and stay for a while. 

As they cut a ribbon Thursday night, Melton and McAvay both marvelled at a long-held dream coming to fruition, beaming as they walked through the hallways and posed by a sign that announces the center in big, bold letters. 

Earlier in the evening, Gateway’s Adrien Esdaile had heralded the power of “our shared vision,” and those words seemed to echo in the air as attendees strolled through the space, snapping photos on their phones and stopping beneath a blue-and-gold balloon archway. 

Back downstairs, some of the student artists who had contributed work were equally excited. Tiana Jackson, a junior who is studying visual art, said she’s glad for the space to be open for the conversations it will doubtlessly spark among students and staff. Her works, multi-level miniature homes filled with collected trash and found objects, are meant to spread a message about reuse, consumption, and collecting. 

A welder and visual arts major at the school, sophomore Arianna Davis said she was also looking forward to having the center as its programming gets off the ground. 

“I grew up as a Black girl in America,” she said. As a kid, Davis only met the white side of her family. She yearned for relatives that looked like her, and experienced anti-Black discrimination firsthand in the private and public spaces she traveled. 

As she stepped into her identity, she often felt complicated about the intersection of race and gender. She sees CESJ as a place to talk about and process that sort of layered identity. 

“I think there’s a lot that shouldn’t be overlooked,” she said.