Fortune Mural Update!
As you may know, Alex Breanne is my daughter. Last year, she was hospitalized due to Fentanyl poisoning, considered brain dead. We sought a 2nd and 3rd opinion... all told us the same. We then made the hard decision to end life support. Since she was an organ donor, Alex remained on life support while tests were run to determine which organs could be harvested. I spent that week planning her funeral.
On the scheduled day for ending life support, organ recipients were at the hospital being prepared to receive her organs. I laid, face to the ceiling, on the floor all day, waiting for 5pm when we were scheduled to say our last goodbyes.
At around 3pm that day, I received a call. It was an attending physician, not aligned to Alex. He says to me, "Mr. Mills…I think Alex is tracking me with her eyes! I’m calling this off!" Alex would spend the next few months, re-learning to move and walk, but she's alive!
During the week where her organs were being tested for donation, I started the Alex Breanne Corporation. Our mission is to use research and broader context to identify and address the many reverberating effects of colonialism and slavery. We find lesser known stories of the American enslaved and inject their stories into the communities where they lived, worked or died. This is work I had been doing independently prior, but creating a non-profit for it and naming it after my daughter was meant to be a memorial honoring her... but it has turned into a celebration.
We have multiple efforts underway, including renaming a street in Middletown, CT after a formerly enslaved man named Prince Mortimer. We are also working to get the New Haven gravesite of a formerly enslaved man and his abolitionist wife on the National Park Service Underground Railroad Network to Freedom… their names being Thaddeus & Mary Newton.
Along with those efforts, we are working to have a mural created in Waterbury, CT honoring a formerly enslaved man named Fortune. For 2 centuries, Fortune’s bones were used for medical training and as a museum artifact. For this effort, we’ve partnered with The RiseUp Group, The Connecticut State Historic Preservation Office, the Greater Waterbury NAACP, the Waterbury Mayor’s Office and many others. Cost of the mural will be $25,000. To date, we have raised $18,000! We are aiming for mural creation in late Spring, 2024.
To all of those who have donated, thank you all from the bottom of my heart. I’m immensely humbled by the overwhelming support.
For those who would like to help us towards our goal, please consider donating at https://alexbreanne.org/donate.
Thank you and God Bless.
John
