Fairfield Group Rebukes Racist Antagonists: 'Never Let Them Win'

FAIRFIELD, CT — Fairfield’s Racial Equity and Justice Task Force was nearing the end of its meeting Thursday on Zoom when several images of Black enslaved people unexpectedly appeared on the screen. Then an unidentified voice started spouting racist slurs and phrases such as “kill Black people” and “f*** the LGBT community.”

Selectwoman Nancy Lefkowitz, who co-chairs the task force, tried frantically to remove the intruders but seemed to have lost administrative access. Task force member Sandra Tallman suggested everyone log off and then reconvene.

“No,” co-Chair Gina Ludlow said. “I don’t want to end.”

Ludlow, who had previously been muted by the interlopers, proceeded to tell off the offenders, who addressed her with a racial slur and told her to “go back to f***ing Africa.”

“I don’t care about you,” said Ludlow, who is Black. “You do not hurt me. There’s nothing that you can say to me. You’re the coward who decided to join our call, so, if you don’t have anything valid to say, we don’t really care.”

Lefkowitz continued her efforts to kick off the antagonists while the task force discussed what to do. Member Beverley Vanier urged the anonymous duo to speak. Jason Sherrod and Tameisha Powell-Dunmore thought cutting off the conversation would be more appropriate.

Nearly three minutes after highjacking the meeting, the attackers appeared to leave of their own volition.

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Within hours, police announced they had opened a hate crime investigation, which could be straightforward or highly complex, depending on how hard the perpetrators tried to hide their identities, according to police Lt. Antonio Granata.

“I think Gina Ludlow said it best — cowardly,” Granata said, adding that police would use “every resource possible” in the investigation.

Task force members were undeterred by Thursday’s interruption.

“The work that we’re doing has value because at the end of the day what we’re doing is we’re making sure that every single person feels as though they are entitled to exist in this space in the body that they occupy,” Ludlow said. “I chose not to end this meeting because I will never let them win.”

First Selectwoman Brenda Kupchick voiced her support for the commission Friday.

“It’s not going to deter the town of Fairfield, nor the task force, from doing the work that they’ve been charged to do,” she said, adding that she was disgusted by the racism displayed Thursday.

Several task force members remarked during the meeting that the incident demonstrated the pervasiveness of racism in America.

“I think most people will look at this as an outlier,” Vanier said. “I think there’s lots of people that live their lives similarly that just don’t speak those words.”

Lefkowitz offered a related sentiment when reached by phone Friday.

“We should be refraining from identifying these perpetrators as crazy or sick because it removes the responsibility of the community to take a deeper dive into what happened,” she said.

Ludlow said Friday that the incident exemplified the intrusive nature of racism for people of color.

“I don’t get to decide when I participate in racism. It finds me,” she said. “That is what it is to be a person who lives in Fairfield in my body.”

Ludlow, a school psychologist, worked Friday to connect meeting attendees with mental health advocates and resources.

“They disregarded who we were, and they attempted to take something from us, and they attempted to take our own agency and power,” she said. “We retained who we are at the end of the day.”