Mystic — More than 180 years have passed since 53 people forced from their homes in Sierra Leone staged a rebellion aboard the slave ship Amistad, were captured off Long Island and tried in Hartford.

Since the Amistad uprising, the country has experienced the Civil War, emancipation of slaves, Reconstruction of the South, Jim Crow Laws and the civil rights movement, Len Miller, chairman of the Discovering Amistad board of directors, told a group of about 100 people gathered at Mystic Seaport Museum on Thursday evening.

"And yet, here we are again," he said. "Slavery may have ended, but not racism."

So began, in a boat shed at the Seaport, the first in a Freedom Forum series of conversations on race, privilege, oppression and justice. The goal was not to solve racism, but to confront it honestly.

The joint effort of the Seaport and Discovering Amistad was limited to a group of 100 community leaders from the Stonington and Groton areas due to social distancing requirements amid the coronavirus pandemic. Kai Perry, Discovering Amistad board member and lead educator, said the conversation would move to other communities, including New London and Hartford, in the near future.

The keynote speaker, state Supreme Court Chief Justice Richard A. Robinson, read from a letter he had written to the Judicial Branch on June 9, following the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. He and other chief justices from around the country had not made such statements before, but this, Robinson wrote, is "a battle for the soul of the nation."

Thursday, he told the gathering, "It's as if the country is at crossroads and what we do at the moment will determine whether we are going to finally live up to America's ideals of equality and true justice for all, or forfeit them to the dust bin of time." The state's first Black chief justice, Robinson has led work within the branch on the issues of cultural competency and implicit bias and has spoken on the topics throughout the nation.

Robinson, who had distinguished himself as a lawyer and judge prior to his nomination for the chief justice position, said he read many comments on newspaper articles that said he was nominated just because he was Black.

He would have loved to have said, "I worked my butt off to get to where I was today." 

He said Thursday that the country has not had an honest conversation on what the institution of race-based slavery did to the United States and nothing has been done to deal with the psychological trauma of slavery. He said a safe space must be created in order to have conversations on race, so that people are able to speak openly and honestly, and people in the conversation must guarantee that they are having a conversation and not a confrontation.

Forum moderator Troy Brown, a Discovering Amistad board member and Judicial Branch official who conducts trainings on implicit bias and other topics, posed provoking questions, such as "How often do you think about your own race?" and "Has race played a role in your profession?" to a panel that included Robinson and three local community leaders. 

Panelist Danielle Chesebrough, first selectwoman of predominantly white Stonington, admitted she's in the "early stage of discovery" when it comes to the conversation on race. She said some days she thinks about her gender, some days about her age, but she doesn't really think about her race.

"But race does play a role in the decisions we make," Chesebrough said. She talked of her Greek grandmother "who came off the boat" and the single mother who raised her, and all of the people in the community who worked so hard.

"It doesn't diminish what they did," she said. "But they did have opportunities that others did not."

Pastor Joseph Coleman of St. John's Christian Church in Groton, a Black man who also serves as chaplain to the Groton City police, said he thinks about race every day, "when you see something like George Floyd." He went on to say that when he was starting the church, "There was a lot of negatives." Coleman said he was denied loans until his white friends stood by him and helped him out. He said when he used to invite white people to the church, they would always ask, "Are there any whites?" Now, he said, he has a mixed congregation and no longer gets that question.

Mary Anne Butler, assistant superintendent of Stonington Public Schools, said she was fortunate to have worked and learned in the Windsor school system, where 70% of students were children of color. "That was the first time I was aware of my whiteness," she said.

The chief justice left the group with four tips from a Forbes.com article by Henna Inam titled "How to Have a Courageous Conversation About Race":  

[naviga:ul]

[naviga:li]Bring your most compassionate and vulnerable self to the conversation.[/naviga:li]

[naviga:li]Be ready to listen and find the hero in the other person.[/naviga:li]

[naviga:li]Connect to the emotional experience of another person.[/naviga:li]

[naviga:li]Our job is to dig deep to understand the values important to us and connect them with the need of the moment.[/naviga:li]

[/naviga:ul]

Antonia Wright, a young graduate of the Amistad Academy in a Black Lives Matter mask, closed the forum with a reading of the words of the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis, who always said that his civil rights work was "good trouble."

k.florin@theday.com