Rally to Support Somali Community in Lewiston — Sat. Dec. 13
Last week, President Donald Trump went on an xenophobic tirade against Somali-Americans, calling them “garbage." In response, our Somali neighbors are organizing a “Rally Behind Our Somali Community” this coming Saturday, December 13, from noon to 3pm at Lincoln Park in Lewiston.
“Our community is hurting after the racist and dehumanizing attacks against Somali Americans,” the organizers wrote. “This moment demands courage, solidarity, and love. We refuse to be silent. We refuse to allow hate to define who we are.”
We encourage union members to show up and show solidarity with our Somali union members, friends and neighbors during this dark time. As the Maine Service Employees Association SEIU 1989 noted in a statement last week, these kinds of hateful attacks are meant to divide and distract us by scapegoating a minority community for economic problems caused by anti-worker politicians and their billionaire benefactors.
“The racist comments coming from the White House are the latest attempt to distract from the fact that the administration and Congress have done nothing this year to address rising costs,” MSEA-SEIU Local 1989 President Mark Brunton said. “Their massive cuts to Medicaid, which they bill as their single legislative accomplishment, will only make healthcare more expensive for working people, in order to give massive tax breaks to billionaires and their cronies, while increasing the federal deficit by trillions of dollars.”
Trump’s racist comments are nothing new in American history. Here in Maine, groups like the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s and the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, used very similar dehumanizing language against Irish and French Catholics. Politicians and anti-Catholic newspaper editors riled up Anglo Protestant Mainers by attacking the Catholic religion and spreading conspiracy theories about our Catholic neighbors.
They saw these New Mainers, many of them fleeing poverty and famine, as a threat to American society. They believed impoverished Catholic immigrants were ignorant, diseased, drunk and lazy. Newspapers constantly ran stories about Irish people committing crimes like fighting, public drunkenness and bootlegging. They blamed Irish bootleggers for contributing to an epidemic of alcoholism, similar to how immigrants today are constantly accused of trafficking drugs. They spread resentment about Irish and French immigrants by railing against municipal programs that gave them shelter like alms houses and poor farms. They held paranoid delusions that Catholics sought to establish a theocracy in New England ruled by the Pope in Rome.
In the 1890s, anti-Catholic American Protective Association spread conspiracy theories that Catholics in Lewiston were running a torture dungeon in the basement of a church. Fearful people sent the Lewiston Mayor letters pleading with him to shut down a Catholic torture chamber that didn’t exist. Today anti-immigrant media and politicians spread those same types of rumors about Muslims.
This kind of hateful rhetoric has real consequences. Here in Maine, anti-Catholic mobs burned down churches, rioted in Irish shanty towns in Bangor, tarred and feathered a Jesuit Priest and burned crosses on lawns to signal their hatred of anyone who wasn’t white, Protestant and of Anglo descent. These groups were also fiercely anti-labor. The American Protective Association had members take pledges not to strike with Catholic workers and urged employers not to hire Catholics. The Maine Ku Klux Klan famously attacked union loggers in Greenville in 1924. Maine KKK-endorsed Senator Ralph Owen Brewster hired a Klansman to spy on labor unions. Scab politician Larry Lockman runs an anti-immigrant organization staffed with former right-to-work for less activists. Racism has always gone hand in hand with anti-unionism because elites know we are weaker when we are divided.
The only way to defeat those who spread racism and xenophobia is by banding together in solidarity with all working people — regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or gender — and fight to defeat the oligarchs and create a more just and equitable society for working class people.
As Brother Brunton says, “all workers, including our immigrant-American colleagues, have more in common than we have differences…When powerful interests try to divide us by ethnicity, color or creed, we must remember that our strength rests in solidarity. All Americans deserve to live free from hate, ridicule and prejudice. We stand united as workers.”