Students honor black lives with prayer, music, and poetry

Members of the Yale community gathered online June 12 for an interfaith vigil to mourn and honor black lives lost to racial injustice. 

Undergraduates representing campus spiritual, religious, and cultural groups organized the vigil with the support of the University Chaplain’s Office. Featuring music, poetry, and prayer, the solemn occasion provided participants an opportunity to grieve, reflect, and engage in communal healing.

In opening remarks, Ikenna Maduno, a rising Yale College junior and one of the vigil’s organizers, noted that in explaining the need for the gathering, it was insufficient to start with the May 25 killing of George Floyd under a Minneapolis police officer’s knee — an incident that sparked nationwide protests against systemic racism. Nor, he said, was it enough to start with the March 13 killing of Breonna Taylor, who was shot dead by Louisville police while she was in her bed, nor the February killing of Ahmaud Arbery by vigilantes as he jogged through a Georgia neighborhood.

“There is no one place where we can start nor end when black lives continue to be lost to racism,” Maduno said. “We gather in this space to lament the devastating reality that the lives of black people in America are treated as expendable. We gather in this space because we know black lives matter.” 

The vigil took place on Zoom, the popular videoconferencing app. Participants swapped their profile pictures with images of burning candles. They observed eight minutes and 46 seconds of silence, marking the amount of time that police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck as the handcuffed man pleaded for air and fell unconscious. A slideshow of memorials to past victims of police or vigilante violence — including Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, and Trayvon Martin — accompanied the period of silence and prayer. 

Joel Thompson ’20 M.M.A., a composer and student at the Yale School of Music, shared his original composition “Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,” which sets to music the last words of seven unarmed black men killed by police or vigilantes. He played the composition’s final section, which features the last words of Eric Garner, who was killed when an NYPD officer placed him in a chokehold in 2014: “I can’t breathe.”

Garner’s last words were also among George Floyd’s final words as he pleaded for his life. 

Sam Oguntoyinbo, a rising sophomore, recited his poem “Night Sky with Exits Bleeding,” which laments America’s legacy of racism and violence through frank and vivid imagery. 

“How long? How long must we still wait for peace?” he asked.

Kiran Masroor, also a rising sophomore, shared her poem “A Body in Motion, A Body at Rest.”

“Remember that a hand’s instinct is to hold another,” she said. “Remember that a heart’s instinct is to beat with another.”

Rising sophomore Zaporah Price recited her poem “Untitled,” which begins: “I wear my Yale sweatshirt, but even it cannot save me from the stares, whispers, and judgments; micro-aggressions, slurs, and officers; chemicals, batons, and rubber bullets …”

The poem ends: “This Yale sweatshirt, it is not police-proof or hate-resistant, and the violence seeps through the seams.”

Price recited a second poem, “Space Race,” which likened the protesters’ demand for justice to a rocket soaring across oceans and continents and hurtling beyond Earth’s atmosphere. 

Violinist Epongue Ekille, a rising senior and member of the Yale Symphony Orchestra, completed the program by playing a rendition of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often called the black national anthem. 

In a closing prayer, University Chaplain Sharon Kugler asked God to bless those gathered with “essential knowledge” so that they, in turn, could become blessings to others. 

“Bless us with the ‘essential knowledge’ that we are a people in need of hope that has teeth, hope that expands beyond eloquent words, hope that beckons us to have affirming hearts, voices and hands in your world seeking justice and dignity for all people,” she prayed. “Bless us with the ‘essential knowledge’ that we your people of all colors, abilities and giftedness can create joy, can nurture tenderness, can love one another with abundance, that we, your people, can do good work.”

Following the closing prayer, participants were invited to join small group conversations focused on community building and actionable steps to confront injustice. 

Undergraduates Abby Langford, Gavrielle Welbel, Laura Glesby, Yousra Omer, Madison Hahamy, Isabel Kirsch, and Anna B. Albright joined Maduno in organizing the vigil. Find a link to the full vigil at the Chaplain’s Office website.