WARREN KIMBRO; NEW HAVEN ACTIVIST

My obit of Warren Kimbro is in the Guardian today, you can find it here. Kimbro's was an incredible story, one I felt grateful to the paper for letting me write. Growing up in the New Haven area, I watched my hometown change from a thriving real city to a ghettoised shell surrounding an ever-more-fortified Yale. I remember being at an FT Christmas party and having an editor who'd been to Yale tell me how much the college had done for New Haven, and I said, that's why we all is so rich and so grateful! This did little for my future as a freelancer for the pink-only-in-colour one.

One thing that didn't make it into the piece was that Kimbro was, surprisingly, a huge Yale sports fan; when I read that it brought his story closer. Even more than that, though, was the memory of having gone on strike at Wesleyan that May, of demonstrating on the New Haven green, and of how even in the middle of all that seeming chaos there was a feeling that something better would come from it. In Middletown, when the body was found in nearby Middlefield, we figured some of the guys I used to hang around the gym with were probably in on the deal. Those were very different times. I'm not sure how much good came from them, but certainly Kimbro's story proves something did, and it gives us all some hope.