by Amy Bass
Lewiston got more than peace. That day, remembers Nadeau, was when everything changed, solidifying relationships that would enable the city to weather future storms. Sitting at his desk in City Hall, an enormous map of Lewiston behind him and Leifer’s photo of Ali standing over Liston to his right, Nadeau marks the mayor’s now-infamous letter as the moment the city figured out how to move forward. There had been a few attempts—City Hall’s forums, the Franco Center’s “meet your neighbors” events—to bring people together. But nothing like this.
“I think that very unintentionally, Larry’s writing that letter was the watershed moment for this community, because it served as the catalyst for everything else that followed,” Nadeau says. “It galvanized the community.”
He notes that often it takes a tragedy of some kind to bring together this kind of response. But in Lewiston, “no one got killed, no one got stabbed,” he emphasizes. “We had a letter that was written by somebody who had an opinion about something, and the reaction resulted in people coming together in a way I don’t think they would’ve ever come together.”
Lewiston had found a new identity. “PEACE PREVAILS” crowed the Sun Journal, noting “thousands embrace Lewiston Somalis” while calling the “racist rally” a “non-event.” The “Many and One” rally filled Bates College’s gymnasium, three thousand strong, while a thousand more crowded together outside in the cold, chanting and singing, cheering for speakers who came outside to greet them. Across town at the armory, several hundred rallied against the few World Church supporters who actually showed up.
“Not in our house,” former Lewiston mayor John Jenkins—the first African American to win the office—repeated as he moderated speeches and testimonials from other former mayors, the governor, high school students, and community organizers who spoke to Lewiston’s new self. “Ou Est Le Mayor?” read one sign, a nod to both the city’s long history of immigration and the absence of Raymond from the event. It was something that U.S. Senator Olympia Snowe, who attended alongside colleague Susan Collins, found apt. Snowe grew up in Auburn, the daughter of a Greek immigrant.
“What is happening right now across town—that is not who we are,” she said in a prepared statement handed out to reporters. “There is no place for them in Maine, no place for them in Lewiston, and no place for them in America.”
Muhammad Ali also sent prepared remarks. Fighting racism, he wrote, was “a greater contest” than the one he’d fought against Liston back in 1965. Lewiston’s situation is “between those ingrained in bigotry and those who have embraced freedom,” he wrote. “The Many and One Coalition has my full support.”
Lewiston had found a path toward a new identity, a foundation to build on. By 2010, less than 20 percent of Lewiston’s General Assistance budget went to noncitizens, a number proportionate to the percentage of immigrants living in the city. The community had its flaws, Nadeau acknowledged, knowing that racism lived a robust life beneath the surface of any town, including this one. But things were improving.
Chapter 5
I Still Say Somalia
As Lewiston learned how to live with its new residents, schools became the front line of the many transitions taking place. The Somali influx caught school administrators off guard. They struggled to put everything from English language classes to student civil rights teams into place.
Gus LeBlanc grew up in Old Town, just north of Orono on the Penobscot River, a small mill town best known for the eponymous canoes once built there. LeBlanc is a self-described Franco; his grandparents came from Canada around the turn of the twentieth century. At dinner each night, his parents talked about the various insults thrown at them that day because they were French-speaking and Catholic. While he doesn’t remember experiencing prejudice, such tales left their mark.
In Old Town, there were two Catholic churches, one French-speaking and the other English. LeBlanc’s parents married in the English-speaking one because his mother was of Irish descent. His grandfather, whom he describes as “not the most enlightened guy,” refused to go.
When LeBlanc left Old Town for college, he headed just a few miles down the turnpike to the University of Maine at Orono. It was important to his parents that he find something better in life. At college, he played football and pursued teaching, returning to Old Town after graduation to teach history. A long career in education had begun.
After a stint in Dexter, where he captured a few state championships coaching football, LeBlanc headed to Androscoggin County, working at Turner and Oak Hill High Schools before landing at Lewiston’s Montello Elementary School in 1999. LeBlanc had experience dealing with tough situations, and with more than a thousand students, things at Montello had, he remembers, “run amok a little bit.” Within a year or so of his arrival, the Somalis came.
Montello had long dealt with various levels of poverty and the problems that come with it, such as chronic absenteeism. “That had always been the issue in Lewiston,” says LeBlanc. With a high student count and low property values, Lewiston is the largest recipient of school aid in Maine. Today at the high school, for example, a quarter of the population is immigrant but more than 70 percent of the students receive free or reduced-price hot lunches. Yet as the district established English Language Learner (ELL) programs, some people used the new refugee students as scapegoats for low student success rates. The refugees, they claimed, were getting much more help and were draining school resources.
“A lot of them had really never been in school—they didn’t understand how to behave,” LeBlanc acknowledges about Somali students. “English wasn’t their first language, they had a different color skin, and many were Muslims. There was a real cultural difference.”
Accommodating these students went beyond ELL classes. Many of the immigrant parents fell into the category of low-literacy adults, having come from rural areas of Somalia with little access to formal education. By federal law, Lewiston schools translated all forms and handbooks into Somali once fifty families claimed it as their first language. But LeBlanc quickly realized that, even then, many parents couldn’t read the information that was going home, giving them few—if any—opportunities to voice their opinions about their children’s education. His new friend, ZamZam Mohamud, whose children attended Montello, came to his aid.
In Lewiston, Mohamud is one of those people that everyone knows, from the chief of police to pretty much any teacher. “If she was white,” observes one longtime Lewiston resident, “there is no doubt she would be mayor.”
An elegant woman with a contagious smile, Mohamud was the first Somali to sit on the city’s school committee—or hold any city office, for that matter. She has volunteered on the Lewiston Police Department’s Civil Rights Team, the Downtown Neighborhood Task Force, and the library board of trustees. Her daughter, Hanan, served as co–class president at the high school in 2009 and was the first Somali student to serve on the school committee.
Everyone, it seems, knows her story. Having lost much of her family in Somalia’s civil war, she arrived in Lewiston in 2001 with two children and not much else. Within a few days, her son, Jama, cut his foot. In the emergency room, a nurse noticed her command of English and asked for help with another Somali patient. Mohamud had found a job. Eventually, she graduated from Central Maine Medical Center’s College of Nursing and Health Professions as a certified nursing assistant.
Mohamud, who became a U.S. citizen in 2006, was LeBlanc’s first Somali friend. She has played this role for many in Lewiston. While the district floundered somewhat in formalizing its communication strategies, LeBlanc and Mohamud coordinated meetings with parents so things could be explained to them verbally, rather than read via papers sent home. Once parents began to understand what was going on, they helped educate others. When the Bantu began to arrive, LeBlanc learned about tensions they had with ethnic Somalis, some of whom were already well established in Lewiston. He met with Somali elders for help in negotiating such conflicts.
“It
was a tumbleweed,” remembers LeBlanc. “As we got going, between the meetings and the translations and people talking to each other about the procedures, it became smoother and smoother.”
Eventually, the district hired Somalis to work as translators and parental liaisons, pushed by a mandate from the U.S. Department of Justice. Abdikadir Negeye worked as a translator at Geiger Elementary, a position with enormous impact but little recognition.
“Making phone calls, taking messages from parents to the teachers, from teachers to the parents,” Negeye says of his daily tasks. “I was kind of a bridge, bridging the gap not only to translate, but also culturally, talking about a lot of things like Eid or Christmastime.”
He constantly reassured teachers that they couldn’t ask him a dumb question. Every now and then, he reconsidered that point.
Not for the first time, Lewiston schools established policies and created solutions for a growing population of immigrant students. Superintendent Levesque reconfigured the budgets to accommodate the exploding ELL program, with local tax dollars supplemented by the state.
“The state of Maine actually gave us a multiplier,” remembers LeBlanc. “If a kid was an ELL student, we got a little bit extra, kind of like disability funding.”
Many worried that the budget shifts would hurt other programs, but LeBlanc didn’t believe that anything suffered because of the new priorities. Levesque, says Leblanc, tried to support the Somalis as he would any other group of students.
“His philosophy was that if we’ve got kids with certain needs, we’re going to have to do what we have to do,” says LeBlanc.
LeBlanc thinks Lewiston became a better school system with better educators. At Montello, for example, he saw vast improvements in the language arts program. Rather than instruct Somalis separately, teachers integrated each lesson, knowing how interaction with native English speakers would benefit all students.
“It made us better at dealing with the needs of our lower socioeconomic and special needs kids,” asserts LeBlanc. “When we figured out what we had to do to help the Somali kids, we actually helped everyone.”
Maulid Abdow recalls his early days at Montello as terrifying. Nothing made sense. One of four children that his mother had in Dadaab, when asked where he’s from, he will say Somalia, even though he’s never been there. But with a bit of prodding, he admits he was born in Kenya, becoming uncharacteristically quiet.
“But I still say Somalia.”
His parents, Hassan Matan and Shafea Omar, came to Kenya from Jilib, the most populous city in the Middle Juba region of Somalia, and a key battleground after the fall of Mogadishu in 2006. Once a rich agricultural area on the main road between the port city of Kismayo and Mogadishu, it has good proximity to both the Jubba riverbank and the Indian Ocean. Today, ravished by drought, it sees a lot of Al-Shabaab activity.
“It was good,” Omar says of life in Somalia, a country she still professes to love, “and then it collapsed.”
In 2002, a few years after the United States officially recognized Bantus as a persecuted minority, the family moved to Kakuma, where they found the heat unbearable and food supplies even more limited. There was no milk or meat to eat, she remembers, just flour and beans. They were afraid to go outside, even for firewood, for fear of being attacked. Looters took most of their few possessions.
Maulid missed the peanut butter sandwiches and soda he’d had for lunch in Dadaab.
After a series of interviews with immigration officers at Kakuma, in which the family had to repeat its stories of loss again and again, they flew to Nairobi, where they lived for fourteen weeks. Verification procedures included ensuring that each of their children—Maulid, his older brother, and his two little sisters—was really theirs. It wasn’t until the last interviews with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service that Maulid’s parents realized America was on the table. They were headed to Atlanta, officials told them. But Matan and Omar already knew about Lewiston from friends. It’s a small city, people told them. Very quiet. Safe. Lots of Somalis. No one mentioned that Maine was one of the whitest states in America because in Lewiston, it felt like there were lots of black people around.
Seven-year-old Maulid had no idea where they were headed. All he remembers is falling down the stairs of one of the many buses he took between airplanes. His earliest memories—his only memories—of refugee camp life revolve around soccer. All day, every day, he ran around the dusty landscape with his father and older brother, Abdiweli. They didn’t have the “fancy balls” Maulid plays with now, his father says. They improvised, wadding up paper, wrapping it in a shirt, and covering it with a plastic bag. Kicking the “ball” with bare feet sometimes hurt, but Matan says Maulid got used to it. He never tired of playing, his father remembers. And he was fast, says Omar. From the moment he learned how to walk, one-year-old Maulid was fast.
Like his friends, Maulid is conflicted about what he actually remembers of those days and what his parents have told him. He usually simply says that life in the refugee camps was “fine” or “nice,” the go-to words for many Somali teenagers. But it isn’t just that Maulid doesn’t remember; he doesn’t want to remember.
“I remember some parts, but it’s nothing fun,” he says, struggling for the right words. “I mean, like, it’s fun but it’s—whatever.”
Maulid grows solemn when pressed about his journey to Lewiston. His brightly colored yellow-and-blue dashiki, which he wears with ripped jeans and sandals, belies his suddenly somber mood. He’s a stylish kid; he likes clothes and wears them with flair. Dashikis are not traditional Somali dress, but many students in Lewiston wear them, some days even to soccer practice.
“Bird hunting!” he remembers, his eyes lighting up, an infectious smile breaking beneath his barely-there mustache. He seems relieved to have thought of another good memory about Africa. “Yeah, I used to love to go bird hunting!”
After a week or so in Georgia, Maulid’s family headed north in March of 2005. Maulid remembers seeing snow on the ground and at first thinking it was salt. Cold was everywhere. It seeped through his clothes, got under his skin. He didn’t understand how to counteract it, never mind go to school in it. But getting used to the cold, he soon discovered, was the least of it.
“It took a long time, but I got used to the weather—whatever,” he says dismissively. “But the people?”
He was petrified at Montello, where he started in first grade. He spoke no English and had no idea what was going on, feeling completely alone. The hallways, the other students, the routine—all were foreign to him. He spent his days with a teacher by his side, holding his hand, walking him everywhere. He did not understand why he had to sit for such long stretches of time or what the teachers meant by “behave.” The first time he needed to go to the bathroom, he panicked. He knew where it was, but he didn’t know how to ask if he could go, something he saw other kids doing. He finally decided to just go, running from the classroom. Once safely inside the bathroom, he stayed there, worried about the consequences of what he’d just done.
“It was mad scary,” he says of his early days at Montello, reliving the anxiety that came with not understanding the progression of his own days. “Abdiweli went to school with me, he was like in fourth grade, and like every time I saw him, I would cry.”
Because Abdiweli was in a higher grade, he had a different schedule, something Maulid didn’t understand. Why can’t we be together? he wondered. Why does he keep leaving me? When Abdiweli went to lunch, Maulid went to recess. When Maulid went to recess, Abdiweli went back to class. It made no sense to the brothers; they didn’t understand why they were kept apart. They didn’t get grade levels or recess. Why were there so many different hallways and rooms? Why did they keep moving around?
The bus ride was even worse. Maulid remembers two kids who made fun of him every day. He didn’t comprehend what they were saying, but he knew it wasn’t good. He didn’t want to fight; he worried he’d be sent to jail. Even if he kn
ew whom to tell about it, he couldn’t. Looking back, he knows they were making fun of his skin color, his clothes, his language, and his religion.
By fourth grade, Maulid’s English had gotten “okay” and things felt more comfortable. He started to listen to rap along with the African music he had grown up with, picking up pieces of a new identity in African American culture. His father tolerated his new musical interests, letting Maulid change the radio station in the car. His mother constantly worried about the pull of America on her children; the influence of a culture she did not really understand.
Things regularly took his family by surprise. Their first summer in Lewiston, local Fourth of July celebrations—firecrackers booming throughout the city—sent them into hiding in their apartment for almost a full week, just waiting for it to end.
“Boom, boom, boom,” remembers his father, shaking his head at the memory.
They thought the noise was gunfire, that people were dying in the streets, something that was all too familiar. They’d been enjoying summer; the weather reminded them of Africa. But the second his mother saw a firework—“fire in the sky”—she told her children to get inside. Eventually, Maulid learned about the holiday at school and from some of his Lewiston-born neighbors in the apartment upstairs. He remembers eventually going to the park with them to watch; they’d assured him it would be safe. He went home to tell his mother it was okay.
“No,” she told him. “It’s guns, it’s fighting.”
Maulid finally got her to understand that no one was fighting, but his parents still don’t like the Fourth of July.
With Christmas—another holiday the family knew nothing about—donated bags of presents and clothing arrived at their door. Sweaters, snow pants, and soccer balls—real soccer balls. When spring came, Maulid and Abdiweli went to the park with their father to take the new balls out for a spin.