Pleasantville Vigil Mourns Police Brutality Victims, Calls for Change
By Madeline Rosenberg
Chad David Kraus photo
Raising Black Lives Matter signs and posters with other messages, area residents huddled around the Pleasantville gazebo at an early Tuesday evening vigil – grieving George Floyd’s death and standing against systemic racism.
“We are overcome by a sense of indeterminable pain to this recent tragedy, and others like it that continue to happen across our country,” said Francesca Hagadus-McHale, a former Mount Pleasant Town Board member who organized the gathering. “These events show us that once again, the work we all need to do to come together as a country, as communities, as individuals, goes on.”
Hagadus-McHale told the crowd of about 100 people – ranging from local officials, to high schoolers and infants – that the community must work against racism and stand for equal rights. Officials spoke to the local and national calls for change, including Pleasantville Mayor Peter Scherer, Police Chief Erik Grutzner and local Methodist Pastor Susan Chupungco, alongside state Sen. Peter Harckham and Assemblyman Tom Abinanti.
Chupungco read aloud the names of victims of police brutality, which attendees also scrawled in chalk on the sidewalk along Memorial Plaza before the vigil started. Chupungco said she was grateful the community created a space to express their pain and anger, calling Tuesday’s gathering “a first step” to addressing the country’s systemic racism.
“We, particularly those who are white, the work is ours to do,” Chupungco told an applauding crowd. “Our black neighbors are literally fighting for their lives, and so the task of dismantling white supremacy and eradicating racism is ours and only ours. The cure is the intentional work that we have to do to confront our biases and our prejudices that live within us.”
She said the Pleasantville community has already started to do this work. The Village Bookstore and online retailers have sold out of almost every book that addresses racism and white privilege. A Pleasantville group also started a virtual book club so that “you don’t have to do this work alone,” Chupungco said.
“It shows that you want to show up,” she told the crowd. “It shows that you are ready to eradicate this evil that lives within us and within our society.”
Chupungco praised Scherer and Grutzner for their public statements, released Tuesday afternoon.
Scherer said the community must “renew our commitment in Pleasantville to responsible and humane policing, fair treatment for every person, and respect and care for one another.”
Harckham told the crowd that New York State has already responded to the country’s outpouring of protests and calls for justice pointing to a state Senate package for criminal justice reform.
Still, Harckham called on the crowd to continue holding elected officials accountable, because “being here is not enough.”
“The way we change society, and the way we have always made quantum leaps, is at the ballot box,” said Harckham, who has been addressing crowds twice daily since Floyd’s death. “You must vote.”
Grutzner said he has heard the pain and anger resounding from his conversations around Westchester and the nation, saying that change will come.
“Communities all around the world are hurting, and we hear that. We understand that, and we know that,” Grutzner said. “There has to be change – there will be change – and it will come with the efforts of everyone working together to make the situation better.”
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