"Freedom Futures" Brings Liberation To Hotchkiss Street

Lucy Gellman Photos.

Standing before an altar strewn with flowers, Arvia Walker and Juanita Sunday gathered armfuls of chrysanthemums, purple sweetpeas, and eucalyptus, drawing attendees in close as they blanketed Hotchkiss Street. Looking across a sea of glowing faces, Sunday called out to anyone in who identified as Black.

“Are you here? Are you beautiful? Are you breathing?” she began, and dozens of people surrounded her in slow-motion. “Black people, get your flowers.”

Last Friday evening, that magic and memory-making unfolded at the second annual “Freedom Futures,” a Hotchkiss Street block party and celebration of Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton’s 76th birthday. Hampton never lived to see that anniversary: Chicago Police and FBI murdered him in December 1969, when he was just 21 and on the cusp of fatherhood.

A collaboration among Possible Futures, the 6th Dimension Black Futures Institute and Reverence: An Archival Altar, the event paid homage to both Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party from November 1968 until his death, and to all people who fight for Black liberation, from great-grandparents who are no longer living to organizers continuing that work in New Haven today.

Top: Ashley LaRue, founder of Qommunity: “If we’re talking about freedom and the future, isn’t that what we’re aspiring to?”

“How do we give reverence to folks who are leading our liberation, past, present and future?” asked Sunday, curator and founder of the Black Futures Institute and a peer of Reverence creator and fellow artist Arvia Walker. “The activists, the community leaders, the liberation workers. How do we give reverence and honor all of it?”

As the afternoon gave way to a cool evening, artists, activists and archivists alike answered that question in real time, sometimes gliding from one spot to another as they savored the last Friday of August. Close to Possible Futures’ plant-dotted parking lot, representatives of Fresh New London greeted attendees with Black August and food justice trivia, inviting them to pick up fresh produce in exchange for their correct answers.

On the table, deep-veined collard greens spread out from a basket, nearly touching still-tender curly kale and bushels of fresh basil and carrot greens. Beside a pile of zucchini and cucumbers, pints of baby tomatoes and gherkin cucumbers waited patiently for attendees to come closer. Bunches of beets and chrysanthemums added pops of color.

Sophie Singer-Johnson, Seanice Austin, Jenn Viestas and Ellen Rice. 

At the center of it all, co-director Seanice Austin seemed to glow with delight. As a proud resident of New London, she described food justice as a form of activism, from Fresh New London’s raised beds to its growing urban farms.

“I’m so happy to be here!” she said. “It’s important that we commemorate those who fought, who were in prison, for our liberation. We don’t celebrate the sacrifices they made enough.”

While Austin was born and raised in New York, her family originally hailed from Florida and moved North in the 1920s, in what is now recognized as the Great Migration. In New York and later Connecticut, “we grew up knowing a lot of Black history,” she said. When she became a parent, she knew how important it was to pass that on to her kids.

“This is just who we are and what we do,” she said. 

Nearby, Qommunity Founder Ashley LaRue watched attendees cut out magazine pieces, dip brushes into modge-podge and reach for colored pencils and sheets of rainbow scratch paper. All of them were working on vision boards, she explained—collages representing attendees’ hopes and dreams for the future.

Juanita Sunday and Arvia Walker. 

On one, a design exploded in bright hues against a matte black background. On another, glossy magazine letters sat alongside salmon-colored construction paper. Hers, only half done, cut through scratch paper to reveal streaks and squiggles of brilliant color. The play of light and dark had seemed fitting for the evening, she said. which straddled both Black August and National Suicide Prevention Month. 

“If we’re talking about freedom and the future, isn’t that what we’re aspiring to?” she said.

Around her, the night belonged to Black artists. To a heart-pumpingly good set from Ch’Varda, Hood Hula’s Diamond Tree invited in hoopers of all ages, from young Afghan Hotchkiss Street neighbors to literary luminaries like Kulturally LIT’s IfeMichelle Gardin to Houston resident Mani Olaniyan, a photographer there to visit his friend, The Photobooth LLC’s Bizzie Ruth.

Brenton Shumaker. "It puts a battery in my pack every time I do it," he said of the live screenprinting station.

Down the block, DeadBy5am’s Brenton Shumaker inked up a press, pulled out a white cotton shirt, and began screen printing. Before long, a small crowd had gathered to watch him work.

As she watched the scene unfold against a Kehinde Wiley-esque backdrop, Ruth took a rare moment to herself. For a beat, she pulled a camera to her chest, listening to the street. Prince gave that mellifluous yelp over the speaker system, and laughter mingled with the amplified sound. Then the moment was over: the artist Marsh invited members of her family up to the backdrop, and Ruth jumped back into action.

“I just love being out with my community,” she said. “It always feels like I’m home.”

Those words echoed for Marsh (a.k.a. Candyce “Marsh” John), a painter, muralist, tattoo and sketch artist who had transformed a picnic table into a painting station for her signature miniature portraits. As she took a moment to stretch her legs, she talked about the history and legacy of the Panthers with her mom, Dannetta Wiggins.

Top: Wiggins and her daughter, Candyce Marsh John. Bottom: Bizzie Ruth at work. 

Growing up in New Haven, Wiggins said, she didn’t specifically know about the Panthers. Instead, it was her own mom, who did tenant organizing at the Waverly Townhouses, that she looked up to. Before she knew it as the New Haven Peoples Center, she remembered attending meetings at 37 Howe St. with her mom in the 1980s. It inspired her to take an active role in grassroots activism herself, including in the Hill-based group Survivin' N' Da Hood.

“I love community so I think that this is beautiful,” she said. “It’s nice to see it in the neighborhood—it reminds me of when I was a little girl.”

Behind them on Edgewood Avenue, artist Joel Cruz slid open the window to Caribe Soul’s signature black-and-orange truck and began serving fresh, hot empanadas wrapped in wax paper. After offering him a ticket in return—in the spirit of Hampton, everything was free—attendees nibbled the treats as they floated from station to station, leaving newly-finished vision boards and new food justice factoids in their wake.

Babz Rawls-Ivy. 

“Celebrating the Black Panthers is always a good idea,” mused Inner-City News Editor and WNHH Community Radio host Babz Rawls-Ivy as she inspected an installation dedicated to Hampton, complete with quotations and black-and-white photographs.

In one, taken during Hampton’s student years at Proviso East High School, he was still just a baby-faced kid, then a star member of the junior NAACP. In another, he addressed a crowd protesting the trial of the Chicago Seven in October 1969. He was murdered less than a week later.

As an alum of the former Ivy Street School (it is now a transitional housing program) and a kid growing up in Newhallville, Rawls-Ivy remembered attending the Panthers’ free breakfast program, which ran out of the Newhallville Teen Lounge at 179 Shelton Ave. in the late 1960s. Decades later, that first touchpoint stayed with her: she’s now become a sort of community fairy godmother, looking out for Newhallville’s kids from her Ivy Street porch (and at least once a year, during neighborhood caroling). 

That sense—of something sacred, and something still evolving—was clear as dusk crept in, and Sunday and Walker gathered attendees for a moment before kicking off an outdoor open mic. Behind them, large-petaled flowers opened and soared skyward in a mural to abolitionist Ruthie Wilson Gilmore. 

Top: Enroue Halfkenny, Babaláwo Onígbọ̀nná, who led a portion of the evening honoring and holding space for ancestors. Bottom: Sunday and Walker. Both of them shouted out CEIO for its support of their work.

"If you are a person that is an activist, someone that does liberation work, someone that is a community leader, please don't be shy,” Sunday started. “I want you to come up and grab a flower.” Around her, the crowd was suddenly quiet, uncharacteristically demure. “I know there's folks in the crowd. I see y'all!"

Slowly, activists began coming forward. There were community organizers, climate activists, holistic healers. “Get those flowers!” cried Farron Harvey as they pulled up their phone to record the scene. It kept rolling as Sunday called up elders, youth, and those who identified as Black. 

Back inside Possible Futures, that work of reverence was in full swing. Between a series of scanners, photo printers and stacks of new, canvas-bound albums, people pulled out dozens of family photos, memories criss-crossing the room. Seated at the back, archivist Jennifer Coggins worked with Dash Watts and Yanitza Cubilette to scan a last batch of family photos before the evening was over.

Dash Watts and Jennifer Coggins. 

Coggins is a community engagement archivist at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Watts, who moved to New Haven from Atlanta two years ago, does research on how music and meditation can lead to healing. It was the first time the two had met—and already, they were deep in memory, thanks to the photographs building a bridge between them.

“This is the best block party I’ve ever been to,” Watts said as he fingered the blurry, aged edges of a photo from his childhood. When he moved to New Haven from Atlanta for work in 2022, his family photos were among the relatively few possessions that he brought with him.

He pulled out a few more well-loved photos. There was his grandmother in a flowered dress, holding him as an infant. There was a young Dash in a soccer uniform, all smiles. There was Dash at 4 or 5, dancing with an elderly relative. Time froze and thawed as a scanner hummed across the table. “This means everything to me.”

“I’m really grateful for the work of Fred Hampton, the fearlessness and vision,” Watts added of the event. “He’s a big reason that we are able to be here today.”

Top: Farron Harvey and Yanitza Cubilette. Bottom: Diamond Tree and Houston resident Mani Olaniyan.

Across the table, Cubilette paused on a photograph of her grandmother, Miriam De La Cruz. Raised between Florida and the Dominican Republic, Cubilette was grateful for the space to both grieve and remember some of her ancestors, she said—and the way they passed down everything from humor to their mannerisms. In one image, for instance, De La Cruz is holding a cigarette exactly the same way her granddaughter would generations later.

For Walker, those kinds of revelations—and the time and space to have them—are part of the point of Reverence. Last year, she launched the project as a way to honor and grieve her grandfather, who passed away in 2019. But her interest in building and preserving narratives goes back to her childhood, when she would page through photo albums and reading her grandmother's "love notes" as a way to remember and process.

"She would write to my mother, to me, to her lovers, and to whoever she was putting into her albums,” she remembered Friday. Now, Reverence means "thinking about, like, when we're gone, how we're documenting ourselves."

She added that it was the Black Panther Party's theory of change, and specifically its revolutionary 10-Point Program, that initially inspired her work as an organizer. Now, it also inspires her work as an artist and a keeper of culture and memory.

Since starting Reverence, she has expanded it into a community-wide archival project, encouraging others to think about the stories they want to tell about themselves and their families. That work didn't end Friday night, she said: it was ongoing. 

“It's [Reverence is] focused on us creating our own archives for our families and for ourselves,” she said. “We all have our greats and our giants in our families—the folks who have made us who we are today.”

“When we create our own archives as Black folks, as people of color, as individuals in general, these are spaces of reverence, of honoring, of deep respect and commitment to our folks.”