Courtesy of Farah Najjari.

Being a history maker is nothing new for Mariam Khan ’24.

Khan, who was elected to a four-year term on the Hamden Board of Education this month, is just 19 years old, making her the youngest elected representative in the Board’s history. She is also the first Muslim-American elected to office in Hamden.

“I was, you know, overcome with emotion,” Khan said. “They started to read out [the election results] and my hands were shaking.”

Activism shaped by identity 

Khan’s first political memory took place in eighth grade, when her class was having a discussion about identity. She remembers speaking about the hardships of growing up Muslim in a post-9/11 world, to which many of her peers related. 

“I think this applies to any, you know, marginalized community, when you’re younger, you kind of know that you’re treated differently,” she said. 

Later that year, her teacher, impressed by her comments, had her speak to a panel of educators about Islamophobia in classrooms. Khan credits her passion for “educational equity” to this experience.

When she arrived at Hamden High School, Khan immediately began working to address issues of diversity and racism in the school community. She founded Global Youth Activists, a club with the mission of “amplifying youth voices.”

Imaan Masood, a senior at Hamden High School and president of GYA, said that Khan was a tour de force. When it came to improving the community, Masood said, “I felt like [Mariam] always saw those areas. And she did the best that she could to try to fix them.”

Khan’s first and longest term project with GYA was a collaboration with Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, or IRIS, a New Haven-based refugee organization. She led book and backpack drives, engaging students in helping others in the community.

In 2019, Khan and GYA hosted a mayoral forum for students. 

“Students asked questions about [school resource officers], about curriculum, about revising the [academic] calendar,” Khan recalled. She said she was proud that the forum brought student concerns to the forefront of town politics.

Masood credited Khan with building an organization that would last long after her graduation. 

“A lot of our people in the club are underclassmen,” Masood said. “They really enjoy the message of the club and being able to do stuff like that affects people in our communities.”   

Beyond GYA, Khan founded Connecticut Period — a club focused on combating period poverty — at Hamden High during her time there. She said that she was inspired to start the club because the school charged 25 cents for each menstrual product at the nurses office. 

As the head of CT Period, Khan successfully got rid of the requirement of payment in Hamden High. She led students in creating “period packages” — hand-designed bags filled with feminine hygiene products — and coordinated their donations from schools, libraries, restaurants and other businesses throughout Hamden, West Haven and New Haven. Through social media, Khan was also able to promote the club, which held a rally against period poverty on the New Haven Green.

“She never made it feel like a chore,” Farah Najjari, a longtime friend and Khan’s Board of Education campaign manager, said about her experience organizing with Khan. “She never had a negative attitude about anything. It was very much okay, this is what I’m going to do, you guys are going to help and the rest is history.”

Eventually, with Khan as the state lead, CT Period took its campaign to Hartford, testifying at the State House in February of 2020 in support of a bill that required free feminine hygiene products in Connecticut’s school bathrooms.

“Every menstruator deserves access to period products,” Khan wrote to her legislators. “No student should have to choose between school and periods; no woman should have to choose between food and pads; no menstruator should have to choose between their body and humanity.”

(Student) Board of Education Representative

Khan’s decision to run for one of two non-voting student representative seats on the Hamden Board of Education was far from premeditated. 

When she decided to apply, Khan managed to secure the last interview spot, at the very end of the day. 

“I remember, there were a lot of students who came in, you know, full suit and tie,” Khan said. “That day, I only had my gym clothes, and I was like, in my gym clothes.”

Outside of her attire, Khan came prepared. She told Board of Education representatives about her plan for increased board transparency and student involvement. 

She got the gig. 

Her favorite and most memorable project on the board was making Eid a school holiday.

Darius Cummings, Khan’s co-student representative on the Board of Education, supported the initiative.

“We follow all the other Abrahamic calendar holidays; we have nothing for any Islamic holiday,” Cummings told the News. “She was really [like] hey, if you guys are so interested in diversity and inclusion, why are we not implementing it into the way that we, you know, interact with the curriculum?” 

To push for the change in calendar, Khan packed the Board of Education hearing with Muslim families clad in traditional clothing to share the excitement of Eid. 

Masood said Khan’s leadership around the Eid proposal was special. 

“Honestly, I’m also like, a Pakistani Muslim student like how she is,” Masood said. “And so it just shows that like, with the right amount of determination and momentum that I mean, she was able to accomplish so much.”

But Khan’s time on the board was not all triumphs. Hamden Public Schools has not yet made Eid a holiday, and both she and Cummings ran into communication issues with the rest of the board.

“We dealt with a lot on the board that we didn’t necessarily share,” Khan reflected. “And you know, being the two students of color, young students of color, trying to push for a lot, it became really tiring and taxing to have to not have emails answered or to be ignored.” 

“Doing the work alongside people, not for people”

Khan’s activism did not end at Hamden High School. 

Abdul Osamnu, the councilor-elect for Hamden’s third district and longtime friend of Khan’s, recalled that he first met her volunteering in 2017, on a contentious town council campaign in Hamden’s ninth district.

The district had been held by Republicans for several years, and so when the opportunity arose, both Osmanu and Khan interned on the Democratic campaign, phone banking and canvassing to flip the seat. Osmanu remembers Khan as passionate and outgoing, always attempting to meet and connect with the other campaign interns.  

The pair became friends quickly, and also met Justin Farmer, the councilor in Hamden’s fifth district, around the same time.

In the spring of 2020, Farmer decided to run for State Senate, and he tapped Khan and Osmanu, then just 18, as his deputy campaign managers. 

“I want this campaign to be an organizing opportunity for y’all to learn and grow,” Farmer remembered telling them. 

Khan stepped up immediately, taking over the job of volunteer outreach and coordination. She thrived in the role, taking an operation from 10 to nearly 300 people, all committed to door knocking, lit dropping and phone banking. 

She was even able to turn shy volunteers into expert campaigners. Khan allowed them to express their support through art, creating draws, posters and even memes to promote Farmer both in the community and online.

“Mariam has always been a person who’s had people gravitate to her,” Farmer marveled. “She’s also very organized, which the irony of most organizers are not organized.”

Unfortunately for the trio of Farmer, Khan and Osmanu, the campaign was unsuccessful. But to each of them, it had still accomplished many of its goals. As Osmanu noted, it had filed late, ran into issues with COVID-19, and still “grabbed the attention of people statewide, regionally and even nationally.”

“It wasn’t just about getting elected”

Coming off of Farmer’s loss, Khan admitted she was burnt out. The combination of missing out on an in-person senior year, a long election season and starting Yale virtually in the fall were personally difficult. 

Nonetheless, at the urging of Osmanu, Khan became increasingly involved with the Central Connecticut chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

“For me, it’s about what, again, places policy and people first and seeing the legislative victories, seeing that this is probably the only viable framework to empower people,” Khan shared about DSA. “I think that was what was most exciting for me, something that not only counteracted this binary political system, but had a vision of its own.”

In January of 2021, Osmanu told Farmer and Khan that he was planning on running for a seat on the Hamden Town Council in the third district, joining Farmer. Khan decided to run soon after, and the eponymous JAM slate (Justin, Abdul, Mariam), the first socalist slate elected in Connecticut in 60 years, was born.

Najjari was not surprised about the decision. 

“It was just [Khan] identifying there are so many issues and like reflecting on those issues and doing her best to try to support as many students that you could,” Najjari told the News.  

Khan ran on a platform of diversifying the educator workforce to match the student body. She also wants increased investment in students’ mental health and a redistribution of PTA wealth, so that a system where “some of them raise over $100,000 and others only can raise a few thousand,” does not persist. 

On the campaign trail, Khan knocked doors across Hamden early and often.

Osmanu remembers door knocking in May, before JAM had literature and before any other candidates had begun their operations. “It was kind of just like a listening tour, of sorts,” he said, and it served as the baseline for the rest of the summer.

Najjari remembers canvassing with Khan and talking to a pair of sisters who could not believe that she was a candidate at 19. “They just kind of looked at her in shock,” Najjari noted. Nevertheless, once they talked to Khan, the sisters were sold, committing to vote for her and putting their sons in contact with the campaign as potential volunteers.

Farmer had run for office three times before in Hamden, and he thought the pitch for Khan was remarkably easy. Khan, from her time as a representative, had more experience than most of the candidates. She was just recently a student and a leader amongst students. Farmer noted that often, “the people closest to the problems are closest to solutions,” and thought that was true with Khan.

The campaign received a boost in late July, when, at the Democratic Town Convention, Khan was endorsed overwhelmingly by the party. Her candidacy was also bolstered by Central Connecticut and national DSA endorsements in August. 

On primary day, Khan was up before sunrise. She pollstood from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., and by the end of the day, exhaustion had set in. She remembers waiting for election results in a hot and stuffy gym, feeling slightly lightheaded. 

As results started to stream in from across the town, it became clear that Khan had won, by a huge margin. 

“As soon as I read [the results], I couldn’t even register it. I started tearing up and the screen became blurry. And I just started crying right there,” Khan said.  

Throughout the campaign, Khan emphasized that her election was neither the beginning nor the end of a process. As a socialist, she treated the campaign as one moment in a much longer struggle. 

“I am not a savior,” Khan reflected. “If I’m not inviting people into the work, and pushing for this collective education and this collective mobilization around these issues, I don’t think any real work has been done.”

As for where Khan will go from here, the consensus is the sky’s the limit. “Secretary of State?” Farmer joked when asked.  

“I’d just stay tuned,” Najjari encouraged. “Right now, I think her main focus is focusing on the board of education, really relishing this moment. And giving back to you know, the community that shaped her, obviously, every day, it’s what she does every day.” 

Khan was elected on Nov. 2.