The Maplewood and South Orange communities gathered together on a warm and very windy Friday night for a candlelit vigil to remember the victims of the Atlanta shooting, and to speak out against Anti Asian & Pacific Islander racism and violence.
The vigil opened with Columbia High School student Tai Artis performing Teresa Teng’s The Moon Represents My Heart on flute while volunteers handed out white chrysanthemums to the crowd of about 225.
Kim Chan and Sandra Chung opened the vigil by thanking the Munsee Lenape and acknowledging that it was the Lenape’s land that the crowd was standing on. They tied this into the legacy of colonialism, which not only affected indigenous people but African and Asian Americans as well.
They asked for a moment of silence to honor the eight dead in the Atlanta shootings, which included six Asian American women. They spoke out about the rising violence and hatred against Asian Americans that began last January with COVID-19.
They were followed by Maplewood Mayor Frank McGehee and South Orange Village President Sheena Collum. McGehee told the crowd, “Targeting and blaming an entire demographic for a pandemic is racist and it stops now. As a community we must all do our part to speak out against racism and stand up to hate wherever it exists…And as it was and continues to be for my fellow Black Brothers and Sisters, it must be the same for our Asian Brothers and Sisters”.
Maplewood Mayor Frank McGeHee
Collum echoed the same message by saying, “We show up for each other. We stand together. Hate has no home here!”
SO Village President, Sheena Collum
They were followed by Mia White, from SOMA Justice, who told the crowd that her mother had called her “…to tell me not to look at the newspaper, because she saw her own name printed among the dead. She shares a name with, and is the same exact age as one of the ajummas who was killed. My mother asked me why the government says that she is dead? She wants to know why it seems like this country wants her dead?
“I listened to the fear in her voice and in my own heart — and was again reminded that though we see many public statements which express outrage about this latest episode in American history, what remains ‘unreckoned’ with is the extent to which common beliefs about Asian people as pandemic scapegoats, as untrustworthy faceless-nameless laborers, as inventors of the model minority lie, the extent to which these ideas reflect the persistence of white supremacy, anti blackness, colonialism, and misogyny.”
Speakers also included students from CHS, Nancy Gagnier from the Community Coalition on Race (making a commitment to be more inclusive of the local Asian American population), poet Jung Hae Chae and author Helen Wan, and closed with Reverend Dr. Terry Richardson from First Baptist Church in South Orange.
CHS student Harumi Garrison performed Saint-Saens The Swan on cello, and opera singer Veronica Mak performed Brahms’s Requiem.
The vigil ended with the crowd placing their flowers into the pond.
