The staying power of tolerance

John Jenkins, a black Lewiston native, looked out over the thousands of people who attended his city’s Many and One pro-diversity rally Jan. 11 and declared it a resounding success.

“This is a defining moment in Maine’s history,” said the rally’s moderator. By its enthusiastic presence, Jenkins said, the overflow crowd at Bates College was sending “a clear message” to the white supremacists who clamored for the ouster of Lewiston’s Somali population that racial intolerance had no place in Maine.

“Not in our house,” he said to thunderous applause.

Yet according to a recent Associated Press story, that message does not seem to have traveled far from Maine’s own borders. The story suggested that Mayor Larry Raymond’s clumsy Oct. 1 letter discouraging further Somali migration to Lewiston, and the resulting depiction by the national media of a nearly all-white community seething with racial unrest, continues to brand the city as an unwelcoming and unsafe place for outsiders.

More than 1,100 Somalis have moved to Lewiston in less than two years, but the migration has dropped radically since the controversy erupted. Many Somalis living elsewhere in the United States who recall the original unflattering news coverage about the city still harbor negative opinions of Maine’s second-largest city.

If this is true, then was the large diversity rally merely a feel-good celebration of Maine tolerance and good will whose message failed to reach those very people who needed to hear it most – the Somalis or other nonwhite people who might have been thinking about relocating to our state?

Definitely not, said Steve Wessler, a former Maine assistant attorney general who now directs the Center for the Study and Prevention of Hate Violence at the University of Southern Maine.

“I think the message of the rally got out to many Maine people, and will continue to filter out to Somali communities of Atlanta, St. Paul, Minnesota, and other places in the country,” he said. “The information that’s really critical, whether Somalis can feel comfortable here, will spread further over time.”

Wessler’s center runs regular peer-leader workshops at Lewiston High School, where the city’s white teens and about 150 of their new East African classmates are encouraged to explore the cultural differences that otherwise might divide them. Those students, he said, provide ample evidence every day that the rally and the widespread pro-diversity momentum that created it have made a valuable and lasting statement.

“When I met with a group of Lewiston-born kids and Somali kids the other day, I was most impressed by the pride that all the students had in their school, and how proud they were of the rally and their part in it,” Wessler said. “The Somali students said they were grateful, too, that so many of their neighbors showed up to spread the message against racism.”

Last May, when Wessler began the school program, the white teens and Somali teens rarely mingled with one another.

“Now, everywhere you look those separations are quickly breaking down,” he said. “There’s a sense of teens, white and black, standing a little taller together.”

Wessler said it was unfortunate that the mayor’s controversial letter became the focus of media from the United States and overseas and ultimately caught the attention of the two white supremacist groups that came to stir up trouble.

“They were unusual events, but I don’t view Lewiston as any more racially tense than any other community dealing with racial change for the first time,” he said. “But what sticks in people’s minds tends to be the more highly charged kind of news that surrounded the controversy rather than the good news that came out of the rally.”

For the Somali community in Lewiston, he said, a single rally on their behalf ultimately will matter less than how they choose to portray their new home to family and friends far away.

“While everyone in Maine should be heartened about the rally,” Wessler said, “what’s most important now is that Somali families will talk to relatives about the friends they’ve made in Maine, and how well their children are getting along in school, and all the other things that make their city a desirable place to live.”