Tolerance Day Revisited, Twenty-Five Years Later

[Shallah Kali]

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Twenty-five years ago this week, a case that made headlines around the country was argued in front of the Maine Supreme Court. At issue was a teacher's attempt to organize an event at Madison High School in which students would be able to hear from a diverse group of people, including a lesbian, about discrimination. The planned event followed the well-publicized murder of a gay man in Bangor. But even though Tolerance Day proved too controversial for the school to handle, it marked the beginning of a new era.

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Tolerance Day Revisited, Twenty-Five Years Later
Originally Aired: 4/30/2010 5:30 PM Listen
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In July, 1984, 23-year-old Charlie Howard was harassed, chased and thrown off a bridge in Bangor by a group of teenagers because he was gay. While Howard's murder didn't attract the kind of attention that Matthew Shephard's did in Wyoming 14 years later, it galvanized Mainers, including David Solmitz, a social studies teacher at Madison High School and some of his students in the fall of that same year.

"One of the students said could we invite a homosexual to come in and I said yes, I think that's a very good idea," Solmitz says.
Solmitz proposed holding an assembly and a day-long forum so that students could hear from a diverse group, including a veteran, a Jehovah's Witness, a Franco-American, a Native American and others who had been victims of discrimination. The event was to be called "Tolerance Day."

"We wrote up a proposal to the faculty. The faculty approved it. And the following day the principal and the superintendent came to my classroom and told me that we could carry on with Tolerance Day but we could not have the homosexual," Solmitz says.