By David Fortier

After meeting with the mayor, a local activist has decided that she needs to change her strategy if she is going to be able to address some of the issues that Bristol faces now and, in the future, when it comes to dealing with a diverse population and confronting racism and inequity.

“He made it very clear that the diversity of the community is not his number one priority,” Melina Floyd-Torres said a few days after meeting the mayor for a face-to-face conversation at Expresso Cafe.

“He does not see it as something that government should take a stand on, social and racial justice issues,” she said.

Floyd-Torres met with Mayor Jeffrey Caggiano for a lunch on Wednesday last week at the invitation of the mayor, who said he wanted to get to know Floyd-Torres, in a social media exchange with Floyd-Torres after she noticed he had begun following her on Instagram.

“We all know that if we are going to have a society,” she said she told him in response to his stance, “that we can call this the All-Heart City, that the government will have to be on board.”

Floyd-Torres led community marches and awareness campaigns in Bristol, as part of Black Lives Matter in 2020. In Bristol the march was attended by both city and police officials, who marched alongside participants.

It was her activism, then, that resulted in threats that led her to move away from Bristol. Recent racist and white supremacist incidents, especially the appearance of white supremacists rallying along Rt. 72 this summer, brought her back to hold two community-wide conversations to determine where Bristol needed to go to combat these tendencies.

“I’m definitely re-adjusting some of my strategies,” she said. The community conversation-approach is great, she added, but she said the next steps she would like to take would be implementing some of the ideas that have been raised in those conversations, among others she has had recently.

She said she just wants to make sure that the next steps are ones that get results, and while the meeting might not produce the ones she hoped for–the mayor connecting a strong stance against racism as part of his leadership role along with directing the city’s resources towards efforts that address the underlying racism and white supremacy–there are many avenues to pursue.

“I think that the meeting was worthwhile, meeting anybody in local government, in your local government, and it’s worthwhile to even just get to know and build that sort of relationship,” she said.

She also said, as a result of the meeting, she has been reaching out to members of the community, people like Jaymie Bianca, chair of the Diversity Council, and others who are running for office, such as Corey Nagle, a candidate for Board of Education.

In addition, Floyd-Torres is one of the organizers behind a celebration being planned early in October to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month.

She did go into the meeting well prepared to make her argument about the role of government and the mayor, specifically, to address racism through embracing diversity, she said.

She also addressed a constant theme, one of the mayor avoiding naming it, racism and rather using a more generic term, hate.

“You’re not telling kids what’s out there and what they need to learn about, and why it’s wrong. We have to get to the point.”

Also, she brought along an ally to the meeting, she said. Floyd-Torres invited Adam Antar, of the Bristol Anti-Racism Brigade, to accompany her for the lunch. Antar agreed not to engage in the conversation, but he did take notes for some post-meeting strategy sessions.

BARB was formed last year after white supremacists dropped their propaganda on lawns in the northeast section of the city. When the mayor, took a low-profile response to the presence of the white supremacists, BARB asked for a meeting, which did not lead to any further action on the part of Mayor Jeffrey Caggiano.

However, BARB has remained active in the city, meeting regularly and participating in community discussions on a stronger response to racism and white supremacy. BARB rallied recently outside the Board of Education where the city council was meeting to protest, once again, the mayor’s low-profile response to two recent incidents.

The first was the discovering of white supremacist signs posted along Farmington Avenue, aimed at recruiting new members, and a second, a rally of white supremacists at the intersection of Todd Street and Rt. 72.

Prior to the meeting, they brainstormed ways the mayor and the city might fight inequity and support diversity by facing racism, headlong, aside from naming it rather than cloaking it in generalities, she said.

In the meeting, she presented the ideas, mostly centering on grants that would provide the city with resources for community centers and small business grants for minority-owned businesses.

“We can use this as sort of a blueprint for, how do we work within the system,” she said.

She said at one point, during the meeting, that there are so many ways to attack systemic inequities with this type of funding.

“And he said,” she recounted, “‘Well, there’s a process to this, somebody has to ask for the money,’ so I’m like, ‘Okay, so ask for the money.'”

The mayor began the meeting, Floyd-Torres said, by stating that he was not meeting her to change her mind and he hoped that she was not there to change his.

“I, honestly, may have gone in thinking that I could change his mind,” she confessed.

TBE did contact the mayor for his comments on the meeting. He refrained from comment, calling the meeting private. Floyd-Torres said the mayor told her the meeting was city business.

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