Documentary shows Lewiston’s racial divide

Ziad Hamzeh has done an admirable job illuminating racism in America. The Massachusetts filmmaker’s documentary “The Letter,” which chronicles the 2002 racial turmoil in Lewiston, will be shown this weekend at the Seventh Maine International Film Festival in Waterville.

While it tells the story of Lewiston’s recent racial struggle, sparked by an influx of Somali refugees to the city in 2002, the documentary could have been shot anywhere in the country.

Some of the most powerful parts of “The Letter” are the ugliest. Poor white Lewiston people speaking hatefully and ignorantly about the Somalis, concerned their new black neighbors are going to get something they were not, including cars paid for by the government, free rent and food, and hundreds of dollars a month “to play.”

White supremacist David Stearns of the World Church of the Creator, one of the most vicious, hateful groups in the country, is seen often in the film. He not only embraces racism but lives and breathes it.

His hate speech is one of the most compelling aspects of the documentary and by far the most chilling.

“The Letter” refers to the infamous October 2002 letter that then Lewiston Mayor Larry Raymond had published as an open letter to the Somalis of Lewiston. He essentially said there was no more room at the inn and asked the refugees to tell their friends and family members not to come to the central Maine city.

It was Raymond’s controversial letter that ignited racial tension and caught the interest of the World Church and other hate groups.

The mayor’s letter also inspired opposition to the hate, first by church congregations in a community built by immigrants, and then from other towns in Maine and beyond.

The debate over the Somalis culminated on a frigid January afternoon in 2003 when World Church leaders traveled to Lewiston to hold a hate rally. About 300 people showed up, including an anti-hate group.

Across the city, in the gym at Bates College, an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people from across Maine and New England held a “Many and One” rally to counter the hate rally.

In Hamzeh’s otherwise excellent work, there are some misleading scenes. Since the vast majority of the filming had been done in Lewiston, viewers could easily assume that the scenes of World Church leader Matthew Hale leading a group of followers, arms outstretched like Nazis, took place at the Lewiston hate rally. In reality, it could not have happened in Lewiston because Hale was in an Illinois jail at the time on charges of trying to murder a judge.

Another segment of “The Letter” shows three police officers throwing someone to the sidewalk and jumping on him to restrain him during an uproar in the streets. That never happened in Lewiston, either, nor did a group of skinheads marching down a city street holding their orange-and-black Nazi flags.

Giving the impression that those events occurred in Lewiston implies that the struggle over the Somalis was deeper and more dangerous than it was.

Also misleading are the scenes of the hate rally, which are cropped so tightly that the viewer can’t be sure how many people are there (or how many were actually TV and print reporters.)

That was important to Lewiston people at the time; the fact that the hate rally was actually anti-climatic, drawing just a fraction of the number of people who jammed the Bates gym to rally for diversity and compassion.

“The Letter” will be shown at 5 p.m. Saturday, July 10; 9:15 p.m. Monday, July 12; and 12:30 p.m. Sunday, July 18, at Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville. For more information, call 861-8138 and visit www.miff.org. Liz Chapman can be reached at 664-0524 and bdnnews3@downeast.net.