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Michael Alpert served as the president of the Greater Bangor Area Branch NAACP for the past decade, retiring at the end of 2024. He is the emeritus director of the University of Maine Press. He was a Bangor School Committee member in the 1980s and the chair of the Bangor Board of Ethics in the 1990s and the 2010s. Alpert is a member of the attorney general’s Deadly Force Review Panel.
As the president of the Greater Bangor Area Branch NAACP for the last decade, I have seen American racism as it has manifested itself locally in incidents of hateful behavior, and I have listened to a steady drone of terrible moral indifference. The question that needs to be asked by Americans is: How much has our country advanced as it attempts to fulfill its promise of justice for all of its citizens, including citizens in its minority communities who have historically suffered from official discrimination and societal bigotry?
On a national level, we have all witnessed violent homicides of Black individuals perpetrated by police, the murder of a pastor and members of his congregation inside a Black church, the killings of people of color inside their own homes, the pursuit and murder of a Black jogger, the many killings that have been reported only in local media, and so on ad nauseam. Our country’s perpetual racist war against its own citizens is long, and the tally of its victims is frightening.
In recent years, we have been faced with the matter of legislative and judicial back-sliding: the rolling back of civil rights protections in voting and education; the lack of protection from toxic air pollution and poisonous water in neighborhoods of people of color; the enormous wealth deficit of hard-working Black families; the toxic language coming from the executive and legislative governmental leaders who give license to violence; the wrongful convictions and horrible bigotry against powerless people by our courts; the corporate culture of racist discrimination. The list goes on to encompass all the elements of essential human rights.
But this litany of wrongs is not the entire story. After George Floyd’s murder, thousands of citizens, especially younger individuals, took to the streets of America to peacefully proclaim that Black Lives Matter. (As a noteworthy step, the Bangor Police Department joined the NAACP in a public statement condemning Floyd’s murder.) Also on the plus side, some perpetrators have been held accountable for their crimes.
Although there is now a concerted attempt to limit the scope of education, many Americans understand that the version of history proposed for our schools ignores the shameful legacy of slavery in our country’s past and skips over the Jim Crow racism that many of our white parents and grandparents accepted without complaint and that lingers in coded form today.
Over the last decade, we have been blessed by some responsible, mature leadership in Washington, including leaders such as Ketanji Brown Jackson, Hakeem Jeffries and former President Barack Obama. They and many lesser-known activists have kept the flame of racial justice burning.
Given the pronounced bigotry and ruthlessness of some recently elected officials, our immediate future will be challenging. But this pit into which we have fallen is not a permanent condition. There is good reason to hope for a brighter future. We have seen unhinged leadership before. As President Lyndon Johnson said in response to his racist colleagues, “We shall overcome.”
Here in central Maine, the Bangor NAACP has intervened in incidents of workplace, housing and school-based discrimination. We protested when a Maine state trooper was named “Trooper of the Year” after having cases thrown out of court due to his racist language. We influenced a county commission to remove a monument to a racist U.S. Supreme Court chief justice. We gave guidance to a Black family whose house had mysteriously burned. And we have confidentially intervened in public schools and in private universities when administrators in these institutions unjustly expelled Black students and forced Black employees to resign. Many of our interventions were successful, but a few were not.
What do we need to do to make Maine less racist? I would answer that we must start by educating ourselves to affirm our highest values. We must put an end to our own indifference and denial. We must also intervene with our families and friends when we hear racist language or learn of racist behavior. Consider joining the NAACP or another civil rights organization that confronts racism. Tell elected officials that we care about equality of opportunity and fair treatment under the law.
Maine is a very white state because it has historically been unwelcoming to people of color. Employment, housing, education, social acceptance — all of these areas of everyday life still lack genuine diversity and inclusion. Inclusion does not mean erasing cultural differences. It means affection and empathy for those who are not exactly like our own immediate families; it means overcoming alienation; it means decency and goodwill.
If Mainers will insist on these qualities, we will move forward toward the ideal of justice that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared so eloquently on a hot August day in Washington in 1963. It is up to us to fulfill King’s dream for our own well-being and for the generations that will follow in our footsteps.