This week on the podcast, we’re bringing you a special broadcast. Beacon host Cate Blackford sat down with author and advocate Heather McGhee as part of the Authors Guild Foundation’s Pascal Hall Author Series for a conversation about McGhee’s book The Sum of Us and what it can teach us about building solidarity in a…
On a recent Beacon podcast, Maine People’s Alliance deputy director Ben Chin sat down with Andy O’Brien, communications director of the Maine AFL-CIO and a journalist covering the far right. In the conversation, the two covered a range of issues, including the history of white supremacy in Maine, the role that misogyny and control over…
As part of a truth-telling initiative that seeks to illuminate the issue of land claims and the 1980 Settlement Act as well as celebrate the resilience of Indigenous communities, the group Wabanaki REACH has partnered with a Maine-based theater organization to create a play developed by and for Wabanaki people. The play, titled where the…
More than 80 Mainers rallied in front of the State House on Saturday to emphasize the importance of love and inclusivity following a protest held by neo-Nazis earlier this month in Augusta. Leaders of the event on Saturday, which was titled “Love is Louder” and was held on World Humanitarian Day, said they were spurred…
About two dozen masked neo-Nazis saluted and shouted “sieg heil” at cars passing the Maine State House last Saturday. Video posted on social media showed them shouting “refugees go home” at a car with Black passengers. The group’s protest at the capitol came in response to an article warning of a stream of “75,000 foreign-born…
Sen. Joe Baldacci of Bangor is calling for law enforcement to crack down on a known neo-Nazi’s plans to develop a white supremacist training camp and community in northern Maine. Last year, former U.S. Marine Christopher Pohlhaus, leader of the neo-Nazi “Blood Tribe” who previously resided in San Antonio, Texas, began inviting his members to…
The House on Tuesday failed to override Gov. Janet Mills’ veto of a bill that would have allowed farmworkers in Maine to gain protections under some of the state’s wage and overtime laws — a result that means agricultural employees in the state still won’t have access to basic labor rights. The vote was 61-61,…
Gov. Janet Mills vetoed a bill Wednesday that would have allowed farmworkers in Maine to gain protections under some of the state’s wage and overtime laws — a decision that a prominent labor leader called “embarrassing and shameful.” The bill, LD 398, sponsored by House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross (D-Portland), would have made farm laborers…
As millions and millions of immigrants came to our shores in the 19th century and into the 20th, ensuring a much brighter future for America, the conditions they found when they got here were less than satisfactory. Unsafe tenement housing, which packed hundreds of people into subdivided homes originally designed for a single family (often…
A judge last week ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to search for and release documents related to its detention practices in Maine and a planned facility in Scarborough, ruling that ICE acted unreasonably in response to a Freedom of Information Act request for such records. At the beginning of 2021, the ACLU of Maine,…