‘Emma Jones Justice for Malik Corner’ OK’d
by Laura Glesby, Oct. 8, New Haven Independent
The corner where East Haven police officers chased, shot, and killed 21-year-old Malik Jones in 1997 will not be called “Malik Jones Corner” after all.
Instead, the Board of Alders decided to name that inter-section after Jones’s mother, Emma, and the campaign for police accountability she has carried forth after his death…. On Monday, Oct. 7, the full Board of Alders unanimously voted to amend the proposed corner name to “Emma Jones Justice For Malik Corner,” an edit proposed by Fair Haven Alder Frank Redente.
Redente … elaborated after the meeting that he heard passionate feedback from constituents about the corner-naming proposal in recent weeks.
Some opponents of the proposed corner name took issue with Malik’s criminal record… the input that primarily spurred his amendment Monday night was “more that Emma was being left out.” Emma Jones’s activism around the memory of her son led to the creation of New Haven’s Civilian Review Board to review complaints of police misconduct, a board on which Redente now serves…
As he introduced the amendment during Monday’s meeting at City Hall, Redente explained that the name “Emma Jones Justice for Malik Corner” would “shift away from the personal connection and toward justice.”
…[All] the alders present voted in favor of this name change.
The activists who had first submitted the corner name shuffled out of the room after the vote. [Norman] Clement immediately called Jones to update her…
“I think it’s important to have Malik’s name there because of what happened to him, and I never want people to forget,” Jones said. She praised how the new version puts her own name alongside Malik’s and “gives it a greater meaning.”
“It’s a great honor,” she said. “I didn’t expect to be honored. But I’m delighted that people thought enough of me to remember all of the work that I did do.”
She hopes it will speak to the terror that so many mothers of Black sons have felt and still feel — “your son goes out to the store to get a loaf of bread, and you’re terrified because you don’t know whether he’s coming back.”
“I will never forget what that officer did to my son,” she said. Now, neither will the street.
Article can be read in its entirety at https://tinyurl.com/kp997bb7.
