Japhet Gonzalez cuts the ribbon Friday morning. The center image features an eagle, a nod to the school's mascot. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Maybe it's the eyes that bring a viewer in, soft and gentle as they look over the sidewalk. Or the mouth, parted halfway as if to speak. Maybe it’s a brilliant burst of blue and green, which fills the frame like a halo.
Inside it, a beatific Sylvia Mendez has appeared on Union Street, ready for a conversation. Beneath her, Shirley Chilsolm looks out onto the road, rocking a red-rimmed pair of glasses that glow in the sun. Just a few feet away, Huey Newton seems ready to chime in. The words of Thurgood Marshall hang between them, a bridge.
Those figures, all underrepresented in American history, now adorn three lunettes outside of High School in the Community, where public art has joined a larger effort to bring history to life. Rooted in both social justice and efforts to beautify the school, they are a collaboration between students in Ben Scudder’s Black & Latino History elective and Yalies Johan Zongo and Katelyn Wang of Bright Spaces, a public art collaborative at Yale’s Dwight Hall.
In the finished piece, Mendez, Chisholm and Newton are all represented in portraiture; the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall is represented with a quote.
“I always would walk by here and they just seemed so empty,” said HSC senior Japhet Gonzalez at a ribbon cutting Friday morning, motioning to the now-vibrant images behind him. “Most of our school is Black and Hispanic. This representation is very important to have outside of our school.”
The murals, which fill three boarded-up, painted-over lunettes near the corner of Union and Water Streets, grew out of a class project in Scudder’s class last year, during which students weighed in on who they wished to see depicted on the wall. There were, initially, many contenders: astronaut Mae Jemison, rapper Tupac Shakur, U.S. Rep. and civil rights icon John Lewis, abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass and Bayard Rustin among others. Each student had to advocate for their pick, making the project another opportunity to dive into history.
After students voted, four figures remained: Sylvia Mendez, whose fight for civil rights began in California’s elementary schools when she was just a kid; U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisholm, who was the first Black woman in Congress; Thurgood Marshall, a trailblazing civil rights lawyer who was the first Black justice at the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), and Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton, whose history is intertwined with New Haven’s.
Between them are shared histories of migration, both voluntary and forced; of activism that was met with vitriol and sometimes violence; of holding one’s heritage close, often at the risk of personal and professional safety. Mendez, for instance, was just a girl when her parents, who were Mexican and Puerto Rican, challenged the Westminster School District after it turned their children away from a largely white school.
Bright Spaces' Johan Zongo and Katelyn Wang.
For her, it catalyzed a life dedicated to social justice, for which Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. Her life is also linked to the landmark court case that followed: Marshall used many of the arguments from the Mendez decision, which was an appellate case, when he argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court eight years later. At the time, he was the director of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, a position he held before becoming a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
Or Chisholm, who brought both her Blackness and her Bajan and West Indian background with her when she ran successfully for the New York State Assembly, and then for Congress, and later for president of the United States. Raised between Brooklyn and Barbados, she became a fierce advocate for everything from children and families to affordable housing, making a path for those like Barbara Jordan, Maxine Waters, Kamala Harris, Jasmine Crockett and Cori Bush.
In the mural, Wang and Zongo have captured that history, with a nod to Chisholm’s legacy in yellows and reds around her immaculate coiffure. Around her beaming face, which floats in a cloud of sunshine-colored paint, are the words: “There is no limit to what we as women can accomplish”—a quote popularized not by Chisholm, but by Michelle Obama decades later. The background vibrates in a shocked, neon blue, just a shade brighter than the New Haven sky.
Japhet Gonzalez, Diana Paola Robles Manso, and Taylor Hargreaves.
For many of Scudder’s students, who are Black and Latino, the act of bringing the figures to life has struck a chord. It’s one thing to open a history book and read a few paragraphs about who someone was and what they accomplished during their lifetime, said Gonzalez. It’s entirely another to revisit their story through public art (Scudder’s class has also tried live theater and role playing as a way to boost student engagement).
He remembered a recent day in class, when Scudder entered the school wearing a sign that read “Boycott Grapes,” with the logo of the National Farm Workers Association. All day, he had to explain to people—both students and fellow educators—that it was a reference to the late labor activist César Chávez, who in 1965 led the Delano Grape Strike, the start of a five-year fight for farm workers to unionize.
“It just shows that there is a lack of knowledge around Hispanic icons,” Gonzalez said. That’s true of countless Black figures in American history, too, he later added, pointing to the mural of Newton that sits at the corner of the building, surrounded by orange and red brick.
In that piece, a young Newton looks out from the frame, as if he is scanning the street for passers-by. Buildings, silhouetted in reds and pinks, rise behind him. A panther leaps forward from the grey of his shirt, more eager than it is menacing. Beside him, and soaring above his head, are the words “The revolution has always been in the hands of the young.” Newton spoke the words from jail in 1968, as the Black Power movement continued outside of prison walls.
Scudder (center, in the cap) with his students and the Bright Spaces team.
Scudder, who is in his sixth year teaching at HSC, was also able to use Newton’s history as a chance to teach students about the Black Panther Party in New Haven, which ran both coalition meetings and its revolutionary Free Breakfast Program in the city from the late 1960s through the early 1970s. This fall, that history seems especially present with the passing of Hill matriarch Ann Boyd, a co-founder of the Hill Parents Association who worked to keep Panther history alive decades after the chapter had dissolved.
“It seems like everything that happens in the U.S. intersects with New Haven,” Scudder said (case and point: National Farm Workers Association co-founder Dolores Huerta spoke in the city in 2022). This year, he’s often reminded of that as he gets a course in New Haven history off the ground. After Gonzalez cut the ribbon Friday, he took students over to the side of the building, where a painted-over break in the brick extends from the sidewalk towards the top of the wall. It felt like another potential blank canvas.
“I’d probably want to see something with law or social justice,” since HSC is New Haven’s “social justice” magnet high school, said senior Taylor Hargreaves, who loves the school’s small, tight-knit feel. Born and raised in the city’s Newhallville neighborhood, she’s very influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement, she said. “Like a whole lot of fists in the air.”
Diana Paola Robles Manso, who is currently working on a class project about the feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa for Hispanic Heritage Month, emphasized the importance of having a figure or moment who could speak to students through art. Before the mural project, for instance, she had heard of Chisholm, “but I didn’t get a deeper understanding of the history until I saw it in my face,” she said.
Building Leader (that’s a fancy word for principal) Nick Perrone, who arrived at HSC earlier this year after several August transfers at the New Haven Board of Education, said he’s excited for the new murals, and hopeful that there will be more to come. Just as murals have beautified the inside of the school in recent years, this makes HSC—which is an old building, where the toll of time is sometimes visible—more welcoming for current and future students and staff.
“It’s so exciting to be a part of it,” he said. “In many ways, each of us is an empty space waiting to be filled with something. It’s beautiful that they took these empty spaces” and used them as a chance to make history come alive.
Wang, who is now working with students at Celentano School, had echoed that praise earlier in the day. “This is just a celebration,” she said.