I had roots here. I graduated from St. Cloud State University. My three lovely children were born at St. Cloud Hospital by the mighty Mississippi, a river that gripped me at a young age in Africa when I first read “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
As a local activist, I worked to ease racial and religious tensions and build a community welcoming to immigrants. But national politics and toxic local media have poisoned the town over the past few years.
Despite the best efforts of some St. Cloud leaders, incidents over the past few years, and the election of President Trump, have emboldened the haters to the point where I’ve come to feel like a stranger.
Prejudice finds its voice
For me, it began in the summer of 2015 in the search for Hamza Elmi, a 6-year-old autistic boy who’d gone missing. The search led us to door knock on the doors of Hamza’s neighbors, asking if they’d seen him.
Many were helpful and volunteered to search. Others were outright hateful with comments like, “A good Somali is a dead one.” Such comments shook me to my core. I resolved to speak and educate against the hate. Hamza was later found drowned in the Mississippi.
Tragedy struck again in September 2016 when Dahir Ahmed Adan, dressed in a security guard uniform, stabbed 10 people at Crossroads Center shopping mall in St. Cloud before he was shot by an off-duty police officer.
I remember receiving frenzied calls from the public, a community with a worried voice. Against the advice of my wife, I rushed out to try and help, and also be an eyewitness.
The attack shocked all our communities, ratcheting up tensions in St. Cloud. Anti-immigrant, anti-Islam sentiments grew louder in the days after the attack. Some people drove around flying Confederate flags. Social media buzzed with hateful comments and physical threats.
Global media descended, looking for a terrorism angle. (Three years later, investigators have yet to connect Adan with terrorism, only claiming he might have been inspired by radical groups.)
In the chaos, I remember St. Cloud Police Chief Blair Anderson as a bright light, telling a Fox News reporter the “vast majority of our ordinary citizens, no matter their ethnicity, are fine hard-working people. Now is not the time for us to be divisive.”
That same year, President Donald Trump came to the Twin Cities area as part of his presidential campaign to fan the flames, attacking the state’s Somali community.
“Here in Minnesota, you’ve seen first-hand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with very large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state without your knowledge, without your support or approval,” he told a crowd, adding, “Some of them [are] joining ISIS and spreading their extremist views all over our country and all over the world … Everybody’s reading about the disaster taking place in Minnesota.”
