RezaRitesRi.com

By Reza Corinne Clifton

(This article appeared in the June 6, 2006 edition of the Kent County Daily Times and Warwick Daily Times)

(George Lima in the halls of the RI Statehouse during his days as a State Representative)

EAST PROVIDENCE, RI-When my editor asked me to interview George S. Lima, immediately and simultaneously I became excited and a little nervous. Over a year ago I had the great pleasure of learning and writing about Lima vis-à-vis an article I wrote about two Providence filmmakers, Napolean X and Ken Bento of Protown Productions. The two local filmmakers talked to me about a documentary they created honoring the important accomplishments of Lima called “Black Men Can Fly”, which they screened for me, and from which I drew my information about Lima.

It is thirteen months after the release of that first article and Mr. Lima’s name was coming to my attention again. Last Thursday, May 18 he received a Doctor of Public Service Degree from Rhode Island College at their graduation ceremony for advanced degree recipients. Receiving this honor alongside other distinguished figures recognized for work done on both local and national levels, Lima certainly stood out in his own right, and I was overjoyed to actually meet this man, whose history and background had so moved me and whose current life was still so awe-inspiring.

At eighty-seven, Lima’s work and accomplishments are vast and meaningful on a variety of levels. In the 1940’s as a Tuskegee Airman—an elite, black pilots group that eventually opened air combat opportunities to African-Americans—Lima indirectly and directly—like the incident at a white officer’s club in Indiana that led to the desegregation of officers bars—attacked racism and segregation in the army and in the nation.

He also campaigned at length for workers rights, for example as a full-time labor organizer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. His labor organizing extended nationally to places like Watts in Los Angeles, California, and took him abroad to Brazil on more than one occasion. But it also grounded him close to his childhood roots, for instance when he worked in Kent County with RI highway workers or at the University of Rhode Island representing farm workers.

Lima was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, as a first generation American son to Cape Verdean immigrants. As a child, he moved to Harlem, New York, but later returned to Fall River, finishing his final two years at and graduating from BMC Durfee High School in 1936. Lima then left again to attend college at North Carolina A&T University. It is there that he explored aviation opportunities. Yet is there where he also met his late wife of 55 years, who, explains Lima, he had to impress with his New York dancing due to her status as a junior and his as a freshman when they met.

He also studied at Ohio State University and the University of Louisville, but it is from Brown University in Providence in 1948 that Lima earned his Bachelor of Arts degree. He went on to work in places like New York and Washington, DC, but he always returned to New England studying for instance at Harvard or working nearby in Boston.

RIC’s recognition of Mr. Lima seems very apt, then, given the work he has done in New England and in RI in particular. Including his work as a labor organizer, Lima has been a leader in civil rights, human rights, and in politics. In the 1960’s, for instance, Lima participated in a sleep-in at the RI State House to advocate for a fair housing bill. “It started as a prayer pilgrimage,” Mr. Lima explained to me. But appearing ineffective, “we started doing songs,” which proved to be more disruptive to the political work happening in the chambers. After inviting the Catholic Bishop, a much bigger assemblage began participating until they were victorious. Despite the housing crisis affecting the state, Lima can still confidently point to “more housing available in more parts of the state” thanks to their campaign.

As a student at Brown, he founded a local chapter of the historically black fraternity Omega Psi Fi and later, served as president of the Providence Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP)—now under the leadership of Cliff Monteiro. He was elected to two terms as a State Representative from District 83 in East Providence, during which time among other things, he and other Black legislators worked to improve the hiring and use of minority-owned enterprises for state contracts.

Lima still lives in East Providence, allowing an accessibility that Jack Carey, 35 year and soon-to be retired American History teacher, surely benefited from. Earlier this year, on January 16, Carey—and five of his students—were part of an audience celebrating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King at an event at Bristol Community College of Southeastern Massachusetts. Mr. Lima delivered a speech at the event, where a written biography was also distributed. Carey and the students, reports Carey himself, were impressed with Lima and extra excited to find out that Lima was a graduate of the high school with which they were all affiliated.

Immediately, tells Carey, he went back to the school and said “We have got to get this guy.” And Carey was the one to lead the effort. Beginning in 1994, Carey became involved in organizing “a fiftieth anniversary of D-Day [the June 6, 1944 WWII invasion of France] made up of hundreds of kids and hundreds of veterans.” Over the years, the event has evolved. In 1995, the event included younger schoolchildren, and at the 2004 sixtieth anniversary, a marker and a tree were planted.

In 2005, the memorial event saw a flagpole added to the high school site, and this year, on Thursday May 25 at 10:00 AM, to be revealed are more flagpoles as well as the addition of comprehensive lighting for the sight. “The great thing about this is that kids have raised money over the years to pay for the additions.”

Carey is doubly proud of having Lima as a speaker since “May is our diversity month too. Even though I believe we live diversity here every day of the year, as the guest speaker of this event that is also at the end of this month, it will be a great opportunity for the minority students to hear him too.” According to Carey, Lima is not necessarily very known in Fall River. On the other hand, recalls Lima, earlier this year it was declared in Fall River that February 7 would be George S. Lima day.

That’s the funny thing I realize, though, after chatting with Mr. Lima on an afternoon this past Sunday that altered from beaming with sunlight, to overcome by rainstorms, and back to sunlight all in our time together. People may never have heard of George S. Lima, but once a person has, s/he almost feels silly for not knowing of him. But if you take another moment, you will realize how it is that history gets passed along.

Positioning us comfortably at his dining room table and relying mostly on memory, though occasionally referencing newspaper clippings, printed emails, and photo albums, Lima invited me into his home and openly spoke to me about himself and his family and dozens of past as well as current projects and campaigns. Current campaigns include but do not stop at supporting initiatives exposing youth to aviation through the Black Air Foundation and the Hood Rich Flight Foundation; extending awards to Cape Verdean community leaders through the Cape Verdean Cultural Exchange Commission; and mobilizing members of the East Providence Minority Caucus to demand their legally sanctioned involvement in the selection of a new East Providence superintendent.

There are other projects and hobbies too, which take Mr. Lima’s time as well, like table tennis, and a parade for which he’ll be Grand Marshall later this year. Considering all these things and his own admission that he does not care for the craft of writing, after an afternoon with him, I have come to an awakening of sorts: neither Lima nor any one person has to be in charge of reproducing his or anyone else’s story. Sometimes it just happens.

Because he enjoys it and because he recognizes his own potential, George Lima has committed himself to doing the work, though he will talk to you if you ask about the work. Providence filmmakers Napolean X and Ken Bento, on the other hand, have committed themselves to spreading Lima’s ongoing story. A retiring History teacher and five students from Fall River committed themselves to spreading Lima’s ongoing story. Rhode Island College played its part in telling his story, and once again, this writer proudly commits herself to doing the same. It is one person and one effort at a time that will ensure that the story of George S. Lima and that of other important community leaders gets passed on. Are you part of this important chain of knowledge?

Reza Corinne Clifton is a community organizer for high school reform at RI Children’s Crusade for Higher Education. She is also a freelance writer whose articles can be seen in The Warwick Daily Times, The Kent County Daily Times, The Providence American Newspaper, Motif Magazine and at www.RezaRitesRi.com. She can be reached by emailing rezaclif@aol.com.

By Reza Corinne Clifton

(A modified version of this article appeared in the May 16 edition of The Kent County Daily Times and the Warwick Daily Times)

(A cyclist stops to watch the throng of marchers - young,
old, Latina, Black, Cambodian, white and more - walk, chant,
and dance in support of dignity and respect for immigrants.)

PROVIDENCE, RI-Everyone saw or heard the headlines, many of which sounded like: Immigrants March, Immigrant Boycott Planned, Latino Businesses Shut Down. Phrases like this led off the news in every medium leading up to the local and national mass demonstrations on May 1, and were embedded in reports about citizen and non-citizen participation. But whose job was it to pick out and distinguish these two subsets of people? And does stamping the word immigrant—oozing as it is with implications for raw, political polarity—oversimplify what many people sought to demonstrate that day or what is being discussed right now in Congress?

The subject of immigration is not a simple one, and the current situation is not necessarily an anomaly one might glean from a report entitled The New Neighbors: A User’s Guide to Data on Immigrants in U.S. Communities prepared for the Annie E. Casey Foundation by the Urban Institute, a center created to provide “independent nonpartisan analysis of the problems facing America’s cities and their residents.” The Foundation is a private charitable organization dedicated to helping build better futures for disadvantaged children in the United States.

According to the report, even though “[B]y 2000, the foreign-born population, as measured by the Census, exceeded 31 million, or about 11 percent of the total U.S. population[.]”, it was still lower “than the historical high of 15 percent [from] around 1900…” The report also indicates that if immigration trends like those that began appearing in the 1990’s continue, trends which the authors say resulted in “well over a million immigrants per year” entering the country, that it is still not until 2050 “when it [the foreign-born population] will again account for about 15 percent of the total U.S. population.”

Besides offsetting the hysteria sometimes associated with discussing the number of immigrants in the country, The New Neighbors report also clarifies and elaborates on labels like legal and illegal, or perhaps more accurately, citizen and non-citizen. “Non-citizens fall into one of four major legal status groups”: legal permanent residents (LPRs), refugees [“and other humanitarian admissions”], temporary residents, and undocumented immigrants. Unlike the latter, the first three groupings represent legally recognized residents, where refugees, for example, “have access to some social benefit programs unavailable to other legal immigrants[.]” and LPRs are those legally allowed to live in the U.S. with “green cards”. On the other hand, as the report explains, “some temporary residents overstay their visas or otherwise violate the terms of their admission and become undocumented.”

The fluidity among the different types of foreign-born is not unique to the non-citizen groupings, though. Naturalized citizens, for example, are former LPRs who have participated in a specific naturalization process. On the other hand, besides those born in the U.S. or U.S. territories—like Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands—“Native-born citizens” also include people not born in the country whose parents are U.S. citizens.

These distinctions are important to keep in mind not just in the national discourse around immigration, but the local one as well. According to the Urban Institute’s report “[E]leven percent of Rhode Island’s population is foreign-born, which is the same as the national average.” There are different characteristics with regard to RI’s foreign-born population as well, like how spread out across the state these individuals and families are and what the countries of origin are; this last factor in particular impacts citizenship status and descriptors. As the report explains:

“A large share of Central American immigrants are [also] undocumented, although many have been granted Temporary Protected Status as they fled war, hurricanes and earthquakes in the region. Other Central Americans and a large number of Cubans have been admitted permanently as refugees or asylees. Still other Latin Americans have been admitted for permanent residency under employment and family reunification provisions. Most Asians, by contrast, have been admitted as permanent residents or as refugees.”

(A group of marchers from the organization PRYSM with their feet and with their banner demand dignity; marchers brought banners, posters, and flags that represented them, like this one conspicuously if not symbolically hanging in front of the RI statehouse.)

Consider a cluster of Southeast Asians who mobilized themselves and participated in the May 1 mass march, representing their cultures as well as the organization Providence Youth Student Movement or PRYSM. As the Director of PRYSM—Kohei Ishihara—explained, in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, individuals and families leaving Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, for example, arrived here legally as refugees. As a matter of fact, elaborates, Ishihara, the influx of people who arrived from Southeast Asia following the withdrawal of America from Vietnam and the removal of the genocide-committing Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia represents the “largest refugee settlement community in U.S. history, and to this day that is still the case.”

In terms of adolescents and young adults accompanying Ishihara, then, few would be directly harmed by measures being considered in Congress that would harshly impact undocumented workers. For Ishihara, their participation was based on other factors: demonstrating solidarity and exposing the youth to a powerful movement that is heavy with younger leaders and participants; and showing dissatisfaction with other measures being considered that could make offenses leading toward deportment based on easier criteria. This last reason highlights one of the threats that even Southeast Asian refugees might face under some of the legislation being debated. For Ishihara himself, one of his parents is Japanese; the other is American.

Another “May Day” participant who would not be directly threatened by alterations in immigration law was the Most Reverend Thomas J. Tobin, Bishop of Providence and the entire RI Catholic Diocese. While those who would criminalize providing assistance to illegal immigrants might have cringed at the participation of RI’s highest in the chain of Catholic leadership, one thing to keep in mind is the demographic and population breakdown of the church. The Catholic Church is the largest church in RI, with almost 150 individual churches and almost 700,000 parishioners, explains Bishop Tobin. Therefore, he asserts, “The church is impacted by any number of issues.”

Furthermore, with a 98.5% increase of Latinos in the state, according to 2000 figures on a United Way report, and with Latin Americans as well as Europeans—including Portuguese and Italians—leading RI’s surge of immigrants according to the New Neighbors report, “a large number of people coming are Catholic…As their religious leader, I wanted to bring a spiritual and prayerful presence to the gathering without the related political issues. I came as Bishop and priest; as a Shepard, I wanted to be with my flock.” He also stresses that he was specifically asked to attend.

Bishop Tobin cites other reasons why he participated in the march as well, based on the moral implications of “rounding everyone up to leave” or of “keep[ing] the status quo”–keeping things as they are and inadvertently encouraging people to enter and stay illegally. He proposes the need for some kind of compromise in which people who are already here receive more help while validating the idea that borders need better control.

Even the reasons for participation by Dominican Republic-born Ivette Luna, who also MC’d the speaking portion at the statehouse following the march, are not as singular as her mixed-location upbringing might imply. Luna moved to Providence, RI around the age of eight or nine, she reports. She went on to attend and graduate from URI, and currently she works for Ocean State Action, a statewide coalition of progressive community organizations and labor unions with headquarters in Cranston that fights for social, economic, environmental, racial, and civil justice.

Luna was selected to MC the event after attending a meeting of the coalition of organizations and individuals organizing the May 1 actions, Immigrants United. May 1 was originally a date that Luna and others had chosen to conduct one of a series of community meetings as part of a campaign against Governor Donald Carcieri’s budget cuts, Emergency Campaign for RI priorities. Acknowledging the momentum of the immigration protests in April, and identifying a cross-over in the people concerned with immigration and those who could be affected by Carcieri’s budget proposal, Luna attended a May 1 organizing meeting to “propose partnering with Immigrants United around her campaign.”

Once there, says Luna, she was “impressed by the dynamics of the people [and ultimately accepted her selection to MC]. They are so diverse; not just Latinos, but Anglo Saxons or Caucasians, [organizations like] Jobs for Justice and the Islamic Association. Even within the Latin American Union, it is diverse with Guatemalan, Salvadoreans, Dominicans and others present.”

(An on duty police officer stops to handle some business in front of the colorful van belonging to RI AM latino community radio station, Poder 1110.)

A Caucasian face in the crowd on the Monday May 1 march was Curtis Carpi Dann-Messier, an employee of Volunteers in Providence Schools who is originally from East Greenwich. Dann-Messier sees a strong similarity between the “power of the people” exhibited by the approximately 15,000 strong march, and protests in the early 1900’s by Italians. “Back then Italians were the ones fighting for full citizenship and they were the mistreated immigrant group,” he explains with first-hand knowledge passed down from an Italian grandparent. It was the same back then, he elaborates, “where it was a movement of the people, not of the leaders and politicians.” As a matter of fact, the Providence area of Olneyville which has emerged as a strong, unified voice in the current movement, points out Dann-Messier, was an area highly populated with Italians who led the RI movement then. He believes that the situation might be cyclical; that, similar to the eventual respect and dignity shown to Italians, Irish, or any other European group that originally experienced the same backlash, it is time to see the same acceptance and respect shown to today’s immigrants.

Dann-Messier also anticipated that it would be a strong number of people who participated, a forecast that excited him thanks to his passion for grassroots movements. Besides the success of the April demonstrations and through the work of Luna and others—who pursued and accomplished a far-reaching media campaign—Dann-Messier’s prediction of the mass participation was also based on reports being brought to him by his students. “A lot of my students were talking about the march and getting really excited about it.” For Dann-Messier, then, he was also drawn to the march around the idea of supporting the students and families he serves.

While Dann-Messier and the countless other speakers and commentators who stated the same sentiments are right in asserting that the march on May 1 represents the accomplishment of a people’s movement, it is important to consider how vast and diverse the people were. As demonstrated by the different dress, physical characteristics and ages, along with the mobilization by Ishihara’s group and the presence of Bishop Tobin, people who marched May 1—and those concerned with current political discourse around immigration—are diverse in ethnicity, citizenship status and motivation, among other areas. Spanish was not the primary language spoken by all the marchers, and not everyone present came from Providence. The topic of immigration reform is not necessarily an easy one to discuss or comprehend; however, we may be losing clarity by continuing to polarize the issue into legal versus illegal, Latino versus non-Latino, and citizen versus non-citizen.

Reza Corinne Clifton is a community organizer for High School Reform at RI Children’s Crusade and a freelance journalist. Her articles appear regularly in The Providence American Newspaper (www.theprovidenceamerican.com), Motif Magazine (www.motifmagazine.net), the Kent County Daily Times and on www.RezaRitesRi.com. She can be reached by emailing rezaclif@aol.com.