John Wilhelm has gotten used to the idea of having a New Haven street corner named after him. It took some work. “Movements aren’t about one person,” Wilhelm remarked to the Independent, echoing what he has told people in New Haven since the Nixon administration.  But one person, wo rking with many other one persons, can lead a movement to change history. As Wilhelm and others he inspired did in New Haven. That’s why the Board of Alders is considering a proposal to name the juncture of College and Elm Streets after Wilhelm. Wilhelm led the successful 1980s organizing drive and subsequent strikes by (what’s now named) UNITE HERE Local 34, which reshaped New Haven. He went on to become president of the national hotel and restaurant workers union. The College-Elm corner is by First Summerfield United Methodist Church, where Yale’s union locals rent their offices. Wilhelm’s “leadership strengthened relationships between institutions and neighborhoods and fostered a deeper connection between the university community and New Haven residents. He is being honored not only for his contributions to working people and the City’s rich labor history, but also for the personal impact he made in the lives of so many individuals whom he coached, encouraged, and inspired over the years,” Ward 1 Alder Elias Theodore wrote to his colleagues urging support of the “John Wilhelm Corner” proposal. The letter was addressed to Board President Tyisha Walker-Myers, a leader in UNITE HERE Local 35. Walker-Myers is a member of the Alder Class of 2011, the union-affiliated majority that won majority control of the board that year and continues to wield it to this day. That majority is one example of how Wilhelm helped build a movement to hold Yale’s local power in check. The idea for naming “John Wilhelm Corner” originated with the Yale Union Retirees Association. It began with members who had worked with Wilhelm to convince fellow clerical and technical workers to support Local 34 in its 1983 election victory, helped organize picket lines in a bruising 1984 strike, then negotiated a first contract with the university that raised wages and benefits at the city’s largest employer and set the stage for graduate student-professors and now postdoctoral researchers to form sister locals. Wilhelm, a Yale grad and leader of Yale’s blue-collar Local 35 union, stepped in to organize the clerical and technical workers after five other unions tried and failed over 15 years. At the time the low-paid largely female workforce was not considered “workers”; the Yale Local 34 victory was one of several that launched a wave of “pink-collar” unionizing victories across the nation. “John Wilhelm gave us our voice in the workplace,” said Cheryl Bergman, who along with her husband and fellow retiree and Local 34 founding member Aldo Cupo spearheaded the petition drive that advanced the corner renaming. “He has a way to figure out that you have an inner personal strength that you can actually use to move some place as big as Yale.” Wilhelm started working for Local 35 in 1969 under the tutelage of Yale union and Central Labor Council leader Vincent Sirabella. After graduating from Yale in 1967, Wilhelm had been working for a Black-led grassroots activist group called the Hill Parents Association. He said he concluded that “there really wasn’t a role for a white organizer” in the Hill following the 1967 riots, the national 1968 uprisings sparked by Martin Luther King, and white flight from the neighborhood. So he responded to Sirabella’s ad for someone to build a stronger union for Yale blue-collar maintenance and physical plant workers. Sirabella had concluded that the sluggish labor movement needed young civil rights and antiwar activists like Wilhelm to help revive it, the way an earlier generation did in the 1930s and 1940s. Sirabella became Wilhelm’s mentor.  Wilhelm moved up the union ranks to build Yale’s unions into a three (then five) local powerhouse, courted by politicians statewide for support. He ascended to the national hotel and restaurant workers union presidency in 1998, negotiating contracts for Las Vegas casino workers, among others. Wilhelm delivered fiery, humorous speeches at rallies. But he was known more for working with people one on one and inspiring workers to become leaders. He insisted on putting union members in the spotlight rather than drawing attention to himself. Watching Wilhelm’s ascent, Sirabella spoke of finding a generation of John Wilhelms to pursue labor careers. One such Wilhelm protege, Gwen Mills, oversaw Yale unions’ political operation in the 2010s before following in Wilhelm’s footsteps to become the current (and first female) national president of UNITE HERE. Wilhelm retired from the UNITE HERE presidency in 2012, then from all union work in 2015. Today, at age 80, he lives in L.A. with the family of his son Vinny (named after Sirabella). The corner renaming proposal is currently before the City Plan Commission. After City Plan hears it, the proposal returns to the Board of Alders (where it originated) for a committee hearing and then an expected final vote of approval.  “I find it quite humbling because countless people have contributed to making all those things happen,” Wilhelm said about the corner naming. “A lot of people I worked with when I was in New Haven of course are now retirees. The idea originated there. I told them if they had asked me about [the renaming], I’d say, ‘No I’m not doing that. Nothing that we’ve done in New Haven is about me or about lionizing any particular person.’ So they didn’t ask me.” Before speaking with the Independent for this article, Wilhelm drafted a tribute to the labor history of the College-Elm corner that has just one fleeting reference to “me.” (The full text of that tribute appears below.) Wilhelm became more comfortable with the “Wilhelm Corner” proposals as he recognized that “their intent was to recognize the role that I played as a part of building the movement. I’m humbled by that.”  What sealed the deal: Reflecting on another one of his inspirations, the late U.S. Rep. Vito Marcantonio. Marcantonio, a socialist, represented New York City from 1934-1950. Wilhelm dedicated his academic work in his senior year at Yale in the “scholars of the house” program to writing an essay about Marcantonio. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has cited Marcantonio as one of his inspirations, as well. After “they told me about this corner-naming idea,” Wilhelm said, he realized “the corner of 116th Street and 2nd Avenue in East Harlem is named for Vito Marcantonio. I thought: ‘I’m going to have a corner just like him. How cool!”’ Wilhelm addresses the 2009 state AFL-CIO convention at the Omni Hotel.  Where “Yale New Haven Meet” Following are reflections John Wilhelm wrote about the Elm and College Street corner expected to be named after him: Yale and New Haven meet at the corner of College and Elm. That corner has been a focal point for decades of struggle to build a better, stronger, and more just New Haven.   Those decades of struggle have built something in New Haven that our whole country desperately needs. Hotel workers, dining hall workers, custodians, school and college cafeteria workers, plumbers, electricians, teachers, lab workers, health care workers, scientists, groundskeepers, librarians, sanitation workers, computer technicians, administrative assistants, students, power plant workers, department registrars, researchers, truck drivers, painters, masons, and all the diverse people who make Yale, other local colleges, public schools, and hotels successful—all of them and many others have joined together across the lines that divide our country. UNITE HERE Local 35, Local 34, Local 217, Local 33, New Haven Rising, and SUN have joined together in solidarity and proven that a rising tide lifts all boats. Generations of working people in New Haven have endured the hardship of strikes, and struggled in many other ways, to build their movement. The corner of College and Elm has seen many of those struggles. In 1971, striking Local 35 members were beaten by police during Yale’s commencement a half block up Elm Street from that corner. Local 217 members at the Omni Hotel (formerly the Park Plaza), visible on Temple Street from that corner, were forced to strike in both 1982 and 2024. In 1984 Local 34 members struck for their first contract, and 96 percent of Local 35 members respected their picket lines in the face of Yale’s threats to fire them all. During that strike, a block from that corner, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin led a civil disobedience in which more than 400 strikers and supporters were arrested. That corner was the site of a large civil disobedience during the last Yale strike, in 2003, as part of a huge march and rally estimated by the New Haven Police Department to include 10,000 people.  During the 1980’s the First and Summerfield Methodist Church, which sits on the corner of College and Elm, became the host to the UNITE HERE Union offices in New Haven.  New Haven City Hall is visible from that corner. During the 2003 strike, then-mayor John DeStefano hosted a meeting in his City Hall office that included Local 35 President Bob Proto, then-Yale President Richard Levin, the mayor, and me. That meeting led to negotiations that settled the Local 34 and 35 contracts. It also led to 23 years without another strike at Yale. During that period of labor peace, 5,000 Yale graduate teachers, researchers, and postdocs became members of Local 33. During that period Yale and the Union have agreed to excellent contracts for all its Union employees. It has agreed to hire more New Haven residents, so the community benefits more from those contracts. During that time UNITE HERE members have become involved in New Haven government. The President of the New Haven Board of Alders, Tyisha Walker-Myers, is a Yale dining hall worker and Local 35 officer.   Ward 1 Alder Elias Theodore, who introduced the “John Wilhelm Corner” renaming proposal. The post Elm-College May Become “John Wilhelm Corner” appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less