Culture & Community | International Festival of Arts & Ideas | Arts & Culture | The Hill
Hill champion Ann Boyd with members of her family. Abiba Biao Photos.
“All power to the people!” Ann Boyd said, raising a first in the air.
Within seconds, dozens of fists joined had hers, cementing solidarity and community empowerment. “All power to the people!” members of the crowd shouted back.
Boyd—who has for decades held it down as a community matriarch— was one of three New Haveners honored last Saturday at “Honoring Hill Legends: Moving On Up,” a project of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas and a dedicated Hill neighborhood committee that is several years running. Held in Trowbridge Square Park, the celebration fêted both longtime Hill activists and the Hill itself, which remains the largest and most diverse neighborhood in the city.
The festival continues Arts & Ideas’ celebration of New Haven neighborhoods, which began this month with fests in Fair Haven and Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hills. Alongside Boyd, the day also honored Hill stalwart John (Johnny) Dye, who passed away last year at 84, the late hip-hop icon Lee Stucky, and veterans of the Vietnam War.
“The Hill is very intentional about showing love to the Hill.” said Shamain McAllister, associate director of education and community impact for Arts and Ideas. “There’s so much history in where we stand. You know, people want a key to the city, but folks got a key to the Hill that’s from their people, by their people, towards those who have served here.”
For lifelong Hill residents like Dr. Pamela Monk Kelley, a member of the festival planning committee and co-chair of the Hill North Community Management Team, it was a chance to honor the long history of the neighborhood, and the people who have lent it a steady heartbeat.
Kelley, one of eight siblings who grew up on Cedar Street, has spent her life advocating for the neighborhood.
“I was born in the Hill, I was raised in the Hill with a school in the Hill, and I also serve God in the Hill,” Kelley said. “So it is very important for me to give thanks, and this day is another way of giving back, bringing together something positive.”
Sitting beside her, her brother Conley F. Monk Jr. ran the commemorations for veterans, distributing legal resources that have become even more critical amongst recent cuts to Veterans Affairs (VA). A Vietnam veteran himself, Monk Jr. founded the National Veterans Council for Legal Redress to provide legal resources to veterans.
“We was never honored when we came back from Vietnam,” he said. “They need to know that there's services available for them, and that's how we help them.”
But the day’s highest praise belonged to Boyd, who came out surrounded by several generations of family and friends in the neighborhood she calls home. Born in Ridgeville, South Carolina, Boyd has lived a life of activism, juggling a dedication to justice work with her love for a big, generations-deep family of New Haveners.
After moving to the Hill as a kid in the 1950s, she has spent her life making the neighborhood a kinder and more just place for those who call it home, from members of the Black Panthers in the 1970s (read more about that here and here) to groups like the Columbus West Tenant Association and Project MORE. Along the way, she raised eight children, working to defend their rights and the rights of other young people as a leader of the Hill Parents Association (HPA).
One year after HPA Founder Fred Harris received his flowers at the same festival, it was only right that she did, too. Her family added that they are grateful: Boyd received a medical diagnosis in March that she only had a few months left to live. Unlike Dye, who was awarded his honor posthumously, she’s here to see it.
It’s clear, too, that she leaves a legacy of justice in the Hill: Boyd’s vigor and grit is palpable through her family and friends. Her granddaughter Tiana Cornelius, a first-year sports management major at Albertus Magnus College, spoke about how she was inspired to write about her grandmother for a class assignment.
When she received the prompt to write an essay about an activist, there was no better person she could imagine.
“You could have a feeling of giving up and just going to speak with my grandmother for a little bit of time just made me feel like ‘If she did it, why can't I do it?’” Cornelius said.
“This is the biggest moment for me, and I can say that because in March, we just got a phone call from her doctor saying that she wasn't gonna be able to make it,” she added, calling the festival a “beautiful moment.”
“God's blessing, she's still with us and able to come to this event to honor her with the key to the Hill, to represent and dedicate her moments in time that she's done for the community and what she's done for people in the community.”