Mookey Van Orden and Dominique Barr, two young residents of Fayetteville, organized a rally at the Matilda Joslyn Gage Center July11 attended by an estimated 120 people.
Barr opened the ceremony with a land acknowledgment of the Native nation land that the organizers and the crowd were standing on.
Elizabeth Barr, who teaches English literature at Fayetteville-Manlius, helped introduce the speakers.
They were joined by fellow community members Garrett Smith and Mary Nickson.
The panel shared their everyday experiences of racism in the community and ways the local community could become involved in being actively anti-racist.
They touched upon the subjects of mental health, incarceration, the Fayetteville-Manlius School District and the 19 days of protesting that took place in front of the Center in June.
Gage Ambassador for Human Rights Alexis Ahn was one of the speakers, and Ambassador Amelia Fuller and her mother, Kelley Ledger, passed out voter registration forms.
Director of the Gage Ambassadors Vanessa Johnson spoke of the program and the plans for moving forward in the future.
Nickson concluded the speeches by singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
The rally closed with protest cries along the curb in front of the Gage Center, the way Van Orden and Barr started, before they ever dreamed a rally like this one could ever come to fruition.
“I am Elizabeth Chloe Erdmann and I’ve been protesting here outside the Gage with Mookey and Dominique and our sister and brother BLM protesters over the last month,” Elizabeth Chloe Erdmann said. “It is a great honor for the Gage Foundation to stand with Mookey and Dominique who organized this rally—and all of our Fayetteville community and beyond concerned with social justice and healing with BLM. Dr. Sally Roesch-Wagner, the director/founder of the Foundation, wants to personally thank everyone here for helping breathe life into this place. It is both a living monument to the life of Matilda Joslyn Gage and a house for active social justice dialogue that seeks to make the world more fair, more loving and flourishing for all—which always begins in communities—like this.”
Erdmann also shared another thought with those gathered.
“I want to share one brief but important thought that I can’t seem to get out of my heart’s mind,” she said. “Throughout human history–humans, much wiser than I and more in tune with the mysteries, have often searched to read the signs from our universe to see what the aims and future is for our human family. Well I can’t help wondering right now if the universe—if she—is looking to read our signs that reveal the desires for the human family’s future. So just in case—these are our signs to read what is important and sacred for our human family.  Let’s not ‘lean in. on something broken first let’s heal our foundation.”