PORTLAND, Maine — With music and words, over a thousand people in Portland's Merrill auditorium remembered the dead in last week's Charleston church massacre.
"My initial response was heartbreak when I first heard about what happened," says Christina Perez, secretary and co-founder of the Portland Racial Justice Congress. "I was pretty devastated, especially the fact that a place of faith got attacked, because you're attacking people's hopes."
They also came from communities across the southern third of the state and they brought with them their personal stories.
One couple I met spends half the year just a few blocks away from the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.
But even some who live here year-round say the racial hatred that led to last week's massacre was personal.
"Racial justice is an issue that's very important to me. My daughter is African-American and we've encountered lots of issues about racism," says Jeanine Connelly of Shapleigh. "I think it's our responsibility to acknowledge that racism exists, to stand against it and to say this is not an acceptable thing in our society anymore."
From the stage, religious leaders and others tried to turn the tragedy into a teaching moment.
Penobscot tribal elder Donna Loring warned the audience not to be distracted by the hot buttons that have been pushed in the wake of the killings.
"We must not take the focus off racism by arguing gun control or the meaning of a flag or the use of the 'N-word,'" she says. "The cause in the core of these murders and other murders and genocides that have occurred in this country can be traced to one thing and one thing only — racism."
And the Rev. Kenneth Lewis of Green Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church says he was not interested in why the gunman opened fire last week, but how people should behave toward others.
"We do not live in a post-racial society," he says. "I don't want to be tolerated. I don't want to be ignored, I don't want to be placated. I want to be seen, I want to be noticed, I want to be understood, I want to be acknowledged, I want to be respected, because I am not an invisible man."
Caroline Losneck contributed to this report.
