Two weeks ago today, I was sitting in a room in New Orleans with 20 other people on our last day of a three-day Undoing Racism training with The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB). The group included some individuals, but also clusters of staff members from justice-focused organizations and partnerships across the country, all looking to develop and deepen shared analyses for understanding racism’s systemic foundations and generational impacts in both themselves and their work.

For almost 50 years PISAB has been leading this training for multiracial groups, grounding people in antiracist community organizing principles and underscoring how racism is the largest single barrier to building effective coalitions for social change. That fact hasn’t changed since their inception, which is one of many reasons why their first organizing principle is “Learning from History”. 

Next door to PISAB’s space in the 9th ward, history is on vivid display at the TEP Center, the former McDonogh 19 schoolhouse that was first integrated in 1960 by three 6-year old Black girls (Leona Tate, Gale Etienne, and Tessie Prevost), each flanked by a U.S. Marshall protecting them against mobs of screaming white protestors. Leona Tate now owns the building and runs the TEP center as an interpretive museum of Civil Rights movement history in New Orleans. Our PISAB trainers highlighted the importance of this history-keeping center, particularly so we remember “how our children always end up on the front lines”.  

Those words have been reverberating in my mind ever since, shuttling into focus as news coverage and conversations with friends and neighbors exemplify the brutality of this truth everywhere, from Gaza to here in Maine:

• Maine Truth Commission to Tell the Story of Forced Assimilation of Wabanaki Children.
• Shame on Us: How Maine Struggles to Handle Troubled Youth.
• How one Maine high school became the center of Trump’s war on trans student athletes.
• Maine school districts preparing for visits from immigration enforcement.

History keeps repeating itself, and racism interrupts our ability to hold a shared understanding of our nation’s foundations in settler colonialism and white supremacy. Our children continue to inherit the ongoing risks of this divide. As James Baldwin says, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality. Or, I am saying, in other words, that we, the elders, are the only models children have.”

This is one of many reasons why justice movements led by communities of color will always be essential. They begin from a place of clarity about the unfulfilled promises of liberty, freedom, and justice for all. The truth of our racialized history and its ongoing impacts are the starting point to build and grow vital community work, nurturing self-determination, advocacy, organizing power, and coalition building for people whose lived experiences don’t reflect our storied national democratic ideals.

This is one of many reasons why I am humbled and honored to work for Maine Initiatives. I get to be part of supporting 90+ community-led organizations that ground and begin with our nation’s unreconciled truths, and build the liberatory models our children can look to as they dream, grow, and work towards collective freedom.

Lia Wilson
Communications Lead

Image: Mural outside the TEP Center by Eternal Seeds.