Abstract
Mary Rose Oakar, the first Democratic female to be elected into Congress from Ohio, details her family and life events. She discusses her upbringing growing up in Ohio City and her work in Congress. She also details her work with the ADC (American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee) and stories of discrimination she witnessed against Arab Americans.
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Interviewee
Oakar, Mary Rose (interviewee)
Interviewer
Assily, Rania (interviewer)
Project
Arab Community in Cleveland
Date
8-30-2016
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
72 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Mary Rose Oakar interview, 30 August 2016" (2016). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 345010.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/908
Transcript
Rania Assily [00:00:02] Okay, here we are in Cleveland, Ohio, with Mary Rose Oakar, the honorable Mary Rose Oakar. This is Rania Assily doing the Cleveland State University digital history project, and we’re very happy to have Mary Rose on board with us today. So thank you for being here, Mary.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:00:22] Rose, happy to be with you, and I’m glad you’re doing the project.
Rania Assily [00:00:26] Thank you. The first question I wanted to ask you, Mary Rose, is, well, what is your full name and who named you and why?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:00:43] My full name? You don’t want my full, full name. My name is Mary Rose Oakar. Two words. My mother, I think, had a lot to do with my name. I actually was born on Jay Avenue in a house because my mother’s mother had died at Lutheran hospital, and she didn’t want to have her last child at Lutheran hospital. She had died on the operating table. So my mother had a phobia. So the doctor said, we’ll come to you. So I was born in the home on Jay Avenue before they moved to West 30th. When she had my brother Jimmy. I don’t know if you want to know this, but when she had my brother Jimmy, I’m the youngest of five kids. When she had my brother Jimmy, he was born on October 7, and she thought she had a baby girl, and it’s the feast of the holy Rosary day, and she named my brother Jim Mary Rose. And then woke up and found out he was a boy and said, well, everybody needs a sunny Jim. So my sister, who already had three brothers, now really wanted a baby sister. So my mother and dad had another child. That was me, and that’s how I got my name. And she always said, you know, I was named after the prettiest flower and blessed mother and all that. But nonetheless, I think it had something to do with my brother Jim’s birthday, which was a feast of the holy of the rosary. So that is how I got my name.
Rania Assily [00:02:25] Where did you grow up, Mary Rose?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:02:27] I grew up in the near west side, which is now called Ohio City all of my life, and went to school in the neighborhood and so forth in Cleveland, Ohio. I was born in Cleveland on Jay Avenue, and one of the most diverse, most fabulous neighborhoods anybody could want to grow up in.
Rania Assily [00:02:48] Now, why did your mother and father, why did they choose this area?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:02:54] I think they chose this area because it was affordable. They were first renting because, you know, they were married in 1931. I’m the youngest of five, and they first lived in Amherst, Ohio. Even though my father was fairly educated, like a lot of people from the old country or different countries, they don’t really get the kind of jobs that they’re really qualified for. So my dad probably wanted to teach and so forth, but didn’t get to do that. They came to Cleveland. He had a sister here and a brother in law, and my mother and he met each other in Cleveland, although my mother was born in Pennsylvania. But when her real father died, Salem Ellison was her maiden name. Ellison when she was five. And her two little brothers were my uncle Lou and uncle Uncle Tom. She, you know, it was very, very poor times. So my grandmother remarried a widower with a son, my uncle Tony. And then they had two kids. So she had five brothers, you know. And ultimately, because they didn’t have much work in Connellsville or Uniontown, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh, they moved to Cleveland and lived in Tremont for a while on Howard Avenue.
Rania Assily [00:04:35] Now, I’m sorry to interrupt your mother. Her family is from. Her family came from where?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:04:41] Her real father came from a village called Khafrun in Syria. And her mother came from what I found out to be when I went there, a very sophisticated family in Homs. They had been ambassadors and spokes, Swahili and all kinds. I mean, it was really amazing. You know, you always think, oh, we’re probably a little bit better educated now. When I went over there, all my cousins on both sides were very, very sophisticated and had some real talent in education.
Rania Assily [00:05:17] Wow. And so what brought your mother’s family here to Cleveland?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:05:22] I don’t know why they came. They didn’t go to Cleveland. They went to Pennsylvania. But I’m not sure I know that. I wish I did know that, probably because they saw that the steel industry was there and so forth. But actually, my grandfather, her real father, and my mother’s uncle, her mother’s brother, were in business together, and they were very successful. They owned car agencies and department stores and all kinds of stuff. And then he died of the flu epidemic that took a good number of people during World War one. And so my grandfather, my real grandfather died, and my grandmother was a widow with three children, my mother being the oldest of the kids. And then she married a widower who they met in Pennsylvania. And then they moved to Cleveland because there were a lot of people from Connellsville and Uniontown live in Greater Cleveland. I found out when I ran for office because they thought there were more jobs there, manufacture of cars, so on and so forth. And my step grandfather was not a businessman. He was a laborer. And so the times were really tough in those days for these people. My parents met each other in Cleveland. She was born orthodox and he was a Maronite. And it was very interesting. They fell in love. She worked for Higbee’s and was going to go to New York to be a seller of some kind of sweaters or something. And they fell in love and wanted to get married. And her stepfather, who was very strict, did not want her to marry one of those horrible Maronites. So they had to. My grandmother and her mother gave permission for my mother to marry my dad. They liked him very much. And she was really more or less raised Catholic because in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, where she grew up, before the 9th grade, they didn’t have an orthodox church, so they went to the Catholic Church. You know, it’s somewhat similar. And she went to catholic school for the first three years and then to a very fine public school. She always talked about her teachers in the public school in Connellsville and how terrific they were. So they ran away and got married and took half their relatives. And can you imagine this? In 1931, he picked her up from Higbee’s and they. They took off to Detroit. And my cousin Esther, my dad’s niece, who now is 102 years old and still alive and fabulous woman, went with them, among others. And they got married at Maronite church in Detroit, Michigan. And then my mother, when she died, we didn’t know she had this, but there was only one sacred thing she had in her life that was private, and that was her cedar chest. And when she died, my brothers said, you and Helen, my sister Helen, go and look at mom’s cedar chest. And we found a diary there. Our first communion pictures, our report cards, all kinds of pictures of me campaigning and stuff like that. Unbelievable stuff that we never knew was in there. And in her diary, which we finally scanned, one of my nephews scanned it, you know, because it was fragile. And it says, my dad’s best man says, joe, Margie’s stepfather is coming from Cleveland. Take this. And he hands him a little pistol, and my father puts that in his pocket. Never used it. And my mom said, he walked down the aisle with a gun in his pocket. So, you know, you think today, true love right there. Yeah, true love. Well, we see people today where religion is important, but it’s not anything like that. But, you know, now, you know, we see Muslims marrying Catholics and Jews marrying Catholics and so on, but it’s not totally common, but it still happens. But my parents, just because of the fact that she was orthodox or born that way, she had to run away, isn’t that amazing that they were that daring.
Rania Assily [00:10:36] They were able to come together.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:10:39] Oh, yeah, they worked it out afterward. You know, they always worked it out. And. Yeah, but it was that they were adventurous. I mean, you have to admit it, that was pretty good.
Rania Assily [00:10:52] And do you think that had to do with the times, too? People were really, you know, people were. Maybe they felt like, you know, we don’t know if we’ll live to see tomorrow, so might as well do what we have to do, you know, in hard times.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:11:05] Well, I think that one of the things that’s true strikes me about the music and my parents and others was that they were very optimistic. And if you. My mother loved music, and so my dad had all his little Arabic records and stuff, but she loved, you know, she was sort of a, you know, flapper, you know, as they call those kids in those days. And so, you know, like, they. She taught my sister, and I knew all these songs from the twenties and thirties and forties because of my mom. You would sing them, like, one song goes, keep your sunny side up, up, you know. You know, it’s always optimistic, and I think that the one thing that I can honestly say about my parents was that no matter what the times were like, and they were tough times with all those kids and, you know, the post depression era and World War two and so forth, they were always optimistic, and they instilled that optimism in us, I think the five of us, and a sense of self confidence. That was one thing that I will value, that my parents gave me. And my sister used to say, mom overdoes it. You know, Helen was very good in art. And my mother would say, you know, you’re better than Michelangelo, Helen. And Helen would say, now she goes a little overboard, don’t you think? I said, well, I don’t know, but I like the fact that she tells us we can do anything. But anyway, that’s just a little bit about my parents. But they were definitely loved their Arab American culture. They didn’t call it Arab in those days, but they called it Syrian or whatever.
Rania Assily [00:12:58] Your father is from Syria?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:13:00] Yeah, he was born in Syria in a beautiful little village called Khafrun. It’s one of the most beautiful villages in.
Rania Assily [00:13:09] Is it a valley?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:13:11] No, no, that’s Lebanon. No, you’re thinking of Lebanon. Beka is Lebanon, but we have relatives. The irony is that it just kills me when people are saying, oh, I’m Lebanese, I’m not Syrian, and all that crazy stuff, because I have first people who are first cousins in Lebanon with their same last name. As mine only spell a little different. Go to Syria when there’s problems and the people in Syria go to Lebanon, and all you do is go over a mountain and they’re all related. And it’s so, you know, it was all Syria and it was all, you know, the, the culture was there. Nobody, you know, it’s the French and the English that chopped up all those countries. I mean, we just had Kuwait. Kuwait was made a country in 1961, you know, so the way they colonized those countries and certainly took advantage of separating the people, which I think is wrong. So that’s why it doesn’t bother me if they want to call me Lebanese. I don’t care, because to me, they’re the same people as my own people and I don’t correct them. But that’s really my background and all of it. I’ve met many relatives in Lebanon and Syria. In fact, in Lebanon, there’s two villages in Lebanon in the north, beautiful area in the north called Beit Awkar, which is the way you would pronounce it in Arabic. And, you know, house of Oakar (Aoukar/Awkar). And then near Beirut, there’s another Beit Awker, and that’s where the American embassy is. And it’s right near a Jesuit and Maronite seminary. And, you know, my father’s brother was a Maronite priest. His uncle was a bishop and all that, so, and my mother was orthodox, but her great great uncle was the patriarch Arida (Anthony II Peter Arida) of the Maronite church. I saw his picture in Jounieh. You know, it’s fascinating. They used to call him the traitor because he converted to be a Maronite from being orthodox, and he became the patriot of the Maronite church. So anyway, so interesting. Yeah, it is. It’s fascinating to know your stuff about your family.
Rania Assily [00:15:46] Mary Rose, can you tell us about your childhood growing up here in this particular neighborhood? What was your childhood like? What was, what did your father do for a living? What did your mom do? And what did you sort of do with your brothers and sisters growing up?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:16:01] Well, I was lucky. I always feel I was spoiled because I was the youngest and I liked being spoiled, and I learned a lot from my brothers and sisters. So grade school was kind of easy for me, you know, because I knew, you know, numbers and different things that my mother read to us every night. So we really, she was pretty good in English, even though she had a 9th grade education. But in Pennsylvania, they used to, by heart, knows Shakespeare. I mean, it was unbelievable stuff I learned in graduate school. She learned in grade school. So it was terrific. Growing up, I had a very happy childhood. I honestly feel, and I’m not trying to be idealistic about it. I did. I was the youngest of five. I had, my sister was seven years older than me and three brothers older than me. And this was a very diverse neighborhood. We had people who were Syrian who lived down the street, people who were Irish, who certainly were around here. Italian? Oh, everybody. Sure.
Rania Assily [00:17:14] Did everyone try to get to know each other?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:17:16] Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, just to give an example, my mother learned how to make Syrian bread and kibbe and stuff from her grandmother. And she didn’t know how to cook too well when she first got married, but her grandmother was still living, and her mother was deceased, unfortunately. But she pitched in and showed her how to make all this stuff delicious. And yet we still had meatloaf and scaled potatoes and hot dogs. And like everybody, all the American families, these Irish kids would come to pick up my brothers to play baseball, you know, the Chambers and the Colder kids, and they’d say, my mother would be making hamburgers on Syrian bread, she called it. And they’d come in and they’d smell this bread and was out of this world, and they’d say, misses Oakar, tell Larry and Jimmy, two of my brothers, that you need us to help you bake and let them play baseball. You know, they wanted to have the food. And my mother would say, nah, Jackie. Nah. Go Chambers, we called them. You guys go play baseball, and you all coming over here to eat afterward. So, yes. Did we have friends of all backgrounds? Yep. And we had a lot of slow, wild kids who went to St. Gwendolin’s. We had a lot of kids who were Protestant who went to different Trinity Lutheran Church or United Church of Christ right next to St. Patrick’s on bridge. I went to St. Patrick’s grade school and Lourdes Academy, which used to be on 41st and bridge, where I taught as a lay teacher. All the subjects I wanted to teach, drama and English and speech and directed all their plays.
Rania Assily [00:19:18] Did you always want to be an English teacher?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:19:20] Did you know from a young age.
Rania Assily [00:19:22] Or did you just develop that through time?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:19:23] No, I probably wanted more to be an actress or something crazy. I see you doing that.
Rania Assily [00:19:30] I can see you doing that, actually, you’re very good.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:19:31] Well, probably. Well, you know, when I was speech in drama major at Ursuline, where I went to college, undergraduate school, they let me take extra courses. So I had a double major, never any charge, I mean, and I actually did not want to go there. I wanted to go to Marquette, but my brother Jimmy was going to law school, Georgetown. Larry just came back from the navy, and he was going to Cleveland state, which was Fenn, I think, at that time. And Helen was taking some classes in art. And, you know, my father just wasn’t able to send me off to Marquette, so I was going to work a year. And then the nun, at Ursuline, called me and said, you would come down here and visit the school. What are you going to do? And it was August. I said, sister, I’m going to wait a year and work and save money for a tuition to go to Marquette. She said, Mary Rose, I have news for you. You probably won’t do that if you work a year. And she said, why don’t you come to Ursuline? And she said, it’s not very expensive. And it wasn’t. And so I did. And I had wonderful experience there, not because of, you know, anything, but I was president of my class three years in a row, and then I was student government president. And if you were student government president in the sixties, they gave you a stipend to travel to other colleges because of the sixties and all the movements going on. And they called it SGA, the Student Government Association. And I traveled to different campuses. I would never have had that experience if I went to Ohio State or Marquette or something. But because of that small institution, and I think because it was a women’s college, what they really believed in was to develop a female intellectually, socially, morally, and physically to your fullest capacity. That was drilled into us, and I think that that ironically, Mary McCarthy wrote a book about women in Congress, and when I was in Congress, most of us went to women’s colleges. Barbara Mikulski, Jerry Ferraro, Barbara Kennelli, etcetera. We all went to women’s colleges, and it was kind of interesting that she figured that out. So…
Rania Assily [00:22:17] I want to ask you, did your parents, did they instill in you this sort of activism or something? Did you or did, were all of your siblings like that? They kind of went into fields that were more about, you know, social activism or at least something, you know, being aware of politics, being. Were you raised with that, or do you think you just sort of fell into it?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:22:36] Well, you know, I read my mother’s diary, and she said, joe and I voted a straight democratic ticket. Well, to put that in a diary, you know, they were Roosevelt people, I think. Although my father did vote for Dwight Eisenhower. He really liked Eisenhower. But no. Well, my mother was a precinct committee person only because she was a homemaker. My dad did not want her to work, and she was raising five kids, and I’m glad she was home, to be honest. Although she could have gone on and probably could have finished school and so on. She was pretty bright, but self taught. A lot of our people are self taught, you know, and they both read a lot. And I do think the reason they asked my mother to be a precinct person was that she was the one that if there was no light on West 30th, she would be the one to ask for a light on West 30th. Or if the garbage people would call her and say, Misses Oakar, why don’t you call city hall and say, we need to have our garbage picked up? So she was pretty active, even though she was home a lot.
Rania Assily [00:23:54] What got her that position, though? Did she want to be in that?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:23:57] Well, no, the councilwoman, who I later ran for council myself and against her, although she gave up her seat and I ran against somebody else. She asked my mother to do that because she knew my mother would be active and be helpful, but she just had it in her. She liked people, and I think people liked her. I remember one time in the sixties, I was teaching a new teacher, and I was supposed to teach at West Tech. I had a contract, and I was offered a job at Lourdes when I went there to speak about Ursuline. But they let me teach the classes I wanted. West Tech wanted me to teach freshman English. I wanted to direct plays and teach senior English literature and stuff. And so the principal offered me this spectacular curriculum to do, and that’s just what I wanted to do, to use my double major. And so my father, before he passed away, way gave me the advice to teach as a lay teacher at the school I went to, which I loved, was a wonderful Catholic school. They should never have closed it. It was the best school, outgoing and very diverse. But I do think there was a sense of activism in our family. I mean, a lot of the immigrants, whenever they came here, they would come to my father, who could write in Arabic and read in Arabic. And my mother was very good in writing for whatever, if they needed something and they needed somebody in English to do it. My mother knew Arabic fluently. She learned it from her mother. And as a little kid, she knew Arabic. And so they were always people that people came to who were new or had a problem or whatever and needed somebody who could translate or whatever.
Rania Assily [00:26:15] Were there a lot of Syrians in this area that needed help?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:26:19] I think there were a lot of people, period, who needed help, but a lot of them, they come from the old country and, you know, they didn’t have a job. They didn’t know how to apply. They didn’t have a biography, a resume. They didn’t. You know, and my dad would help them, and my mother would, too. And I’m not saying they did that full time because they had their own family to take care of, but I do think that because of their…his ability in reading and writing in Arabic, in hers, in reading and writing, understanding Arabic and reading and writing in English, a lot of people came to them. They were a little more contemporary, in a way, than some of the people just coming over, even though if they were younger. But I do remember that. And then we lived across the street from the Jesuits. They used to come over our house just to get away from each other because they lived in the tower. And, you know, my father would host the priests, and he thought it was really beautiful that they wanted to come. And one of the Jesuits used to, who knew Arabic, got ahold of some of my father’s books, and they were in Arabic. They were Aristotle and Plato translated in Arabic, said, is my dad really reading that? I’m just taking these philosophy courses. You know, I didn’t, you know, we never knew as much. You don’t appreciate, I think, some of the things about your parents until you learn about it later. But, no, they were very good, and they were very active in both St. Patrick, St. Maron’s, a little bit in St. George’s, because my mom knew the former. What was his name that just died, that became the head of the whole church. His first mission was on West 14th street, but they were looked upon as a sense, a little bit leadership. And my father knew the liturgy of the Maronite church because his brother was a priest and he had been an altar boy. So in the old days, there’d be a man there. They didn’t have older boys. They’d have a man there responding to the priest at the Maronite church, St. Mary’s.
Rania Assily [00:28:54] So both your father and your mother, they were active in their churches?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:28:58] Yeah, they were. My mother was active in the. Well, not the orthodox. No, my mother became catholic. She always felt she had been raised catholic. She was more catholic than anything else. But we were very ecumenical when I was growing up. We did not. My father, he used to say that the thing that’s very important about the three great religions, you know, the Muslim religion, the Christian religion, and the Jewish religion, is that they had a belief in one God very fundamental, and that should have made them closer together. And I think that was disappointing that it didn’t always so. But anyway, I went on a little bit too much, but go ahead.
Rania Assily [00:29:51] No, you did just fine, Mary Rose. No, this is. I want to ask you, too. What would you say was the best part of being the product of immigrants, and what would you say was the hardest part about being a product of immigrants?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:30:05] Well, my mother wasn’t an immigrant, first of all. Right. But. But my father. You’re talking about my dad, although she was first generation.
Rania Assily [00:30:16] Did you ever feel kind of like, what was your experience, sort of going to school, sort of everyday life? Did you ever feel different or did you always feel accepted? Was there ever a time…
Mary Rose Oakar [00:30:28] Well, we were very diverse in this neighborhood to begin with, but I do think that when I was growing up, Tony, wouldn’t you say? When we were growing up, it was predominantly Irish, wouldn’t you say? And Hungarian? A lot of Hungarians around here. She grew up around here, too, and went to St. Pat’s and Lourdes. Yeah. I mean, you know, I love St. Patrick’s Day. And my father would say, now, don’t you worry when those Irish kids say, you’re not Irish. Of course, I know all the songs better than they do. He’d say, Patrick means “patriarch”. He was from the old country. That’s what my dad would say. He was from the Middle east. So he said, you tell them he’s not Italian. He’s not this. He’s not that patriarch. That’s what he means, Patrick.
Rania Assily [00:31:25] Wow.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:31:26] Well, he might have been, you know, you never know, because when you look at Gaelic, which is not like English at all, there is some similarity to the Arabic writing. And.So.
Rania Assily [00:31:42] So, you know, even during the time when they were translating, the monks, the Irish monks were translating. Like, some of them had to learn Arabic to do that.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:31:50] That’s right.
Rania Assily [00:31:52] There were some like that.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:31:53] And if you look at, there’s a guy in some town in West Virginia, two of the guys that worked in our office when I was head of ADC (Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee), Kareem Shora and his brother Nawar, who are Syrian Muslims. Their father’s a doctor, and one of the best schools for training doctors is the University of Damascus. In fact, Cleveland clinic, they wanted to hire me to recruit doctors from Syria and Lebanon and Palestine, et cetera. 56 doctors at Cleveland Clinic are Arabic, and probably most of them immigrants and heads of departments and everything at the clinic. And same is true at University Hospital. Some of their best doctors happen to be from the Middle east. But this guy from Kareem’s father and his partner, his partner had this museum in one of the larger towns in West Virginia where these kids grew up. And he has the original book written in Arabic. He has all these ancient things plus contemporary things about healthcare and what they used. And he had. I have to call you back. Thanks. Yeah, so.
Rania Assily [00:33:25] So he had this book that was.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:33:27] All in Arabic, and it was. What is the. The first doctor was Hippocrates. Yeah, Hippocrates. Yeah, Hippocrates. It was Arabic, and then they translated it to Greek. That’s what he said. So I don’t know. But he had all these ancient Arabic books all about medicine. All about medicine. And I really do think that is, you know, the origin of culture is from that region of the world. You know, the Alphabet and the numbers. I mean, you know, there’s nothing we should be ashamed of in terms of our culture, that’s for sure.
Rania Assily [00:34:07] Mary Rose. So I take it then, you always felt like, because you’re in this area, it was very diverse. Did you ever come across anything different than that, where you felt.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:34:20] No, I really didn’t. No, I didn’t. When I ran for city council, this neighborhood has people very loyal to each other. I don’t know of any other place like it. And when I ran, a lot of the people I grew up with lived in West park and here and there. But they’re very loyal, and they helped me. A lot of my classmates from grade schools, too, my best friends, most of them are Irish kids, and they’re not kids at heart. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s how I think of them. But no, I never felt inferior to anybody because that was not instilled in me. On the other hand, I knew that, you know, I was a little unique in my class because. But we did have diversity. We had Hungarian kids. We had. Who came during the Hungarian revolution and went to St. Patrick’s. And we had people who were Italian living in our neighborhood. We had lots of Irish kids living in our neighborhood. Some were poor, some were not so poor. And we had a lot of people from the Middle east who lived in our neighborhood, and other Appalachians and Hispanics later came in, and African Americans. So I felt somewhat unique because of my ethnic background. But I don’t think I felt in any way inferior. In fact, I knew that in many ways, my friends love coming over to my house. I don’t think I should print this. I would want this printed. But when my friends visited me in Washington, when I was in Congress, nine of my girlfriends from grade school and high school came to Washington. We had so much fun they were still my good friends, and we were talking about our backgrounds. Every one of them had alcoholic parents, and I didn’t have that. The only time my father drank was at Christmas, and they would bootleg arak because they didn’t sell it in stores, and they’d have Kibbe nayyeh (raw kibbe) or something. This. And that was the only time. And my mother never drank, so that was the only time my parents drank. Oh, dear. Okay, Tony, keep that email from Mark George.
Rania Assily [00:37:13] Okay, I did.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:37:15] Okay.
Rania Assily [00:37:15] Mary Rose, can I ask you, what kinds of struggles do you believe Arabs and Arab Americans face today from your own experience working with them, working with organizations, organizations that protect their civil rights, have you noticed anything recently, or do.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:37:33] You think things are getting better?
Rania Assily [00:37:34] I mean, I just.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:37:35] No, I don’t think they’re better. I mean, they’re different.
Rania Assily [00:37:38] What sorts of things do they face?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:37:40] Well, I think they face terrible things. And when you hear political candidates talking so outrageously about immigration and about Muslims and about whoever, and a presidential candidate talks that way, police. And it’s not partisan with me. If Hillary Clinton talked that way, I’d feel the same way about her. And in fact, my favorite candidate in some ways was Bernie Sanders because I thought he was the most fair minded about, of the Middle east. But anyway, what would you say are their struggles? Oh, their struggles are. After 911, it was bad enough for some of them because there’s a new wave. You know, there was a wave of immigration around the turn of the century, you know, and it was mostly Christians who were trying to escape the ottoman empire. And even Muslims faced from the Middle east faced the same prejudice in some ways, you know, so we’re not just talking about Christians because they were pretty bad to the, the Palestinians, Syrian, whoever, Iraqi people who lived by the Mesopotamian river. They were pretty prejudiced toward Muslims, too, and made them join the army and all that. Today, after 911, especially at the airports, just about everywhere, they have a double standard in evaluation. Now, it is true that the so called terrorists, although we’ve had terrorists in this country, too, in Montana, floating around against the government and all that, white supremacists and all that, and Ku Klux Klan in the past and the way they treated blacks and so forth in different areas. So we’ve had to deal with all that. But the fact is that to categorize a whole group of people because of a few idiots that are terrorists is disgraceful. You cannot take away a person’s civil rights and due process. And when you take away which is constitutional, it’s against our constitution. And I felt very, very strongly even before 9–11, as I mentioned to you over the phone, when I asked my former head of immigration, who did my casework on that, who was an expert, Trish Cooney. What were the two groups who had the hardest time getting a visa or coming to this country? Middle East
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