Wake Up Today, With Your Mind on Freedom
by Victoria Mares
Many of us in Maine woke up post-election to read Portland Press Herald headlines suggesting that "Black" people had just popped up overnight in Maine to invade communities and vote.
"Maine Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster is once again alleging possible voting irregularities, this time claiming that groups of unknown black people showed up in some rural towns to vote on Election Day."
Black people have been in Maine since the 1600's, even though its supposed have been the whitest state in the nation in reports made within the last few years. However, people of color have been joining the descendants of 1600's Maine residents for well over 200 years. Within the last 25 years, wars and conflict as well as natural disasters have brought others to Maine looking for a place to have a life and perhaps raise children with a better future than violent conflict. On one hand, people of color arriving in Maine have quickly had the "black" experience of prejudice, discrimination, even violence that people of African heritage and others judged by hue and accents have experienced over generations. On the other hand, whether we got here a few centuries ago or yesterday, the challenges have been constant,but we have made our free and open space in a country promising freedom and democracy. Within the last 25 years, I have lived in Maine and worked with over a hundred new immigrant families and their children from African and Asian countries. Within that quarter century I have made friends with so many warm and welcoming families. I can name the mothers and fathers that took on their life challenges, worked on helping their families, found small jobs here and there and kept going to school. Sometimes it was just English classes, while others went to job training, even college. They met their economic challenges as people have done throughout American history, trying to make a place for themselves in a strange country.
My friend Zewdu became a widow and had to get on the fast track to English skills, navigating the teenage lives of her children and working on her English and business skills. She invited me to
her home for a celebration party with other new American voters, after Bush lost to Gore...which never happened of course. We heard one of her neighbors say, " I had a dream that an African will save America."
Zewdu still had her van to ferry her friends and neighbors to the polls when President Obama was first elected. I rushed to get her between her English classes so we could watch big screen TV at a local community center as Barack Obama was sworn in as President of the United States. For that election 3 of her children were of voting age. We had watched two of them graduate from college. In the 2008 election, all around the neighborhoods where I had made so many friends, new voters, young adults that I had known as children had voted for president. Multiply this by the hundreds of new Americans of African heritage and those whose families have been citizens for generations, and you have hundreds of new and "old" American voters. These voters are savvy and excited to participate in their country, even with its challenges.
Those new voters of African heritage, especially the young adults, work together with their own neighborhood community organizations, as well as with people of other colors and countries of origin and ."white" friends, colleagues and neighbors s to get out the vote, Teachers, lawyers, advocates, healthcare workers, entrepreneurs, laborers of many colors and backgrounds would like to stay in Maine and raise families. Many have moved on, especially when their lives and livelihoods have been affected by the collective outcomes of thinking like that of Webster.. leaders in public and private sectors who would prefer to continue pretending that people of color are invisible in Maine.
Well, folks of each and every color, Charlie has given us a wake-up call. If we haven't been involved in electing our Local leaders, we had better get busy. Charlie was just saying what too many think. Maine cannot afford this kind of leadership. Resources, energy, education, intelligence, ability, love and caring...that is what Maine stands to lose if the Charlie disease continues to survive. School boards, county, village and city governments need participation by people that expect to move forward and keep Maine alive and beginning to thrive in a world-society. As every vote was important in this 2012 presidential election, every vote is important at the local and state levels. Speak up, act or be left on an invisible field of non-existing people.
It took too long to get here. America's progress in Civil Rights and Equal Justice came on the backs and lives of adults and children who took up the battle and moved this country closer to its founding principles. Don't turn back now.
A friend, Dorothy Oliver,
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?pid=161080730#fbLoggedOut who died on election day before she could vote for President Obama, spent much of her adult 78 years, working fervently to keep Civil Rights progress from sliding backward. She devoted a generous slice of her life to the League of Women Voters, first in the Philadelphia area and finally in New Jersey. She led statewide campaigns and even took on state leadership roles as president and chief financial officer. But always, you could find her talking to old and young, insisting on what was right for her family and for anyone needing her advocacy. Like so many voters' rights advocates that do not make major headlines daily,she was a quiet drum major for justice and voters rights, These are the drum majors that keep our democracy functioning. Democracy is not a Spectator Sport, she would remind you. I am reminding you, freedom is not free. Give it some of your life. Singer John Legend's video reminds us what freedom and voting rights have cost over the years:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/0pOVElQFNMs?list=PL2-HQN2zWEJ1aYryixZU54Cf6xVfKRFt0&hl=en_US
Maine Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster is once again alleging possible voting irregularities, this time claiming that groups of unknown black people showed up in some rural towns to vote on Election Day.
click image to enlarge
Maine Republican Party chairman Charlie Webster
AP
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Webster made the claim in a wide-ranging, post-election interview this week with Don Carrigan of WCSH-TV.
"In some parts of rural Maine, there were dozens, dozens of black people who came in and voted on Election Day," he said. "Everybody has a right to vote, but nobody in (these) towns knows anyone who's black. How did that happen? I don't know. We're going to find out."
When Carrigan pressed Webster on where it happened, Webster provided no specifics or proof of his claims, but said the party would investigate further.
When asked about the issue in an interview Wednesday with the Portland Press Herald, Webster again refused to provide specifics.
Maine Republican chairman questions black voters | The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram
Looking at the words on the t-shirt man’s back, I became
more alert to his movements, although it didn’t interrupt my conversation of
the moment. Yet I kept him in the corner of my eye for my own sense of safety. I
wondered if the Confederate Flag was on his chest. That flag whose history and
culture is one of hate: ferocious racism
that stole the labor, skills and freedom of African slaves for centuries; and waged
terror on men, women and children with lynching before and after the South
lost the war. Lynching on Sundays in the
South brought out whole families after church, carrying picnics to witness the
torture-to-the-death of human beings. The Library of Congress has done a fine job of
keeping the visual, grisly documentation of such activity with its archive that includes lynching postcards ( actually mailed out as souvenirs by the lynching party audience), photos and news clippings. Nineteenth century, African
American journalist, Ida Wells Barnett’s “Red Record,” gives detailed, witness
accounts and statistics on the epidemic lynching of Black people. 
