Our daughter graduated from Bates College last month, 50 years after Lewiston, Maine had its moment in the national spotlight as the location of the second heavyweight title fight between Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali. Graduation was a special time marked by ceremony, plenty of emotion, and good old-fashioned parent pride. Brenna was recognized by Bates for being particularly involved in the Lewiston community during her four years there. She involved herself through the Harward Center and helped to coordinate Project StoryBoost, a volunteer led program that had Bates students reading to early elementary aged kids in the Lewiston public schools.

These days in Lewiston some of those kids are young Somalis named Muhammad. In 1965, that would have been unimaginable. Then local news accounts of the Ali-Liston fight used the name Cassius Clay to describe the fighter that had recently converted to the Nation of Islam. Lewiston, and much of white America, could not accept the change.

In 2001, the first Somali immigrants arrived in Lewiston after escaping a dangerous environment in their homeland. Soon many other Somalis followed. Before long, it became a full-blown crisis with the then-mayor issuing a call for the Somalis to stop coming. Bates College and many others took the lead on welcoming the city’s newest residents in the face of growing hostility. Just fourteen years later, real progress has been made. Somalis have opened businesses along Lisbon Street, work in increasingly visible jobs in the hospitality industry, and have steadily increased their participation in the civic life of this formerly predominately white working class city.

Much more remains to be done. Somali children enter an underresourced school system still ill-equipped to accommodate their needs. Until fairly recently, it was impossible to find a children’s book in the Lewiston area that featured a Muslim character or pictured a woman wearing a hijab. Thanks to Bates professor Krista Aronson and children’s book creator Annie Sibley-O’Brien, the Bates College Picture Book Project now features hundreds of books published in the United States since 2002 with characters of color.

Some whites in Lewiston still are suspicious of the Somalis. Cultural divides abound.

But Lewiston has changed a lot since 1965 and changed for the better. Baxter Brewing and a LL Bean call center now call Lewiston home. The city rejected a gambling referendum In 2011 that would have brought a casino to the Bates Mill complex. Instead, Bates College is free to ponder what an investment in downtown Lewiston might look like for the school. Dorm. Offices. Museum. Community space.

It’s challenging for a small liberal arts college with just 1,700 students to make a significant economic impact in its local community. Bates has done a good job in the last decade of building strong ties to Lewiston and to the Somali population. Now is the time for Bates to take the next step and invest in downtown Lewiston, home to many Somalis. Such a commitment would signal a lasting partnership between an elite institution and its working class host.