Abby Goodnough managed to make a state-wide racial crisis out of a scattered series of alleged racial incidents in Friday's "Threat in Maine, the Whitest State, Shakes Local N.A.A.C.P." [1]
"In October, the N.A.A.C.P. [2] chapter for northern Maine [3] got shocking news. A man from a nearby town had threatened to shoot 'any and all black persons' attending the group's meetings at an old stone church here, and state prosecutors were worried enough to seek a restraining order.
"Such remarks are not unheard of in Maine, the nation's whitest state, which has fewer black residents - 10,918 in 2006, or less than 1 percent of the population, according to the Census Bureau [4] - than some neighborhoods of Chicago or New York. But nor are they usually so blunt. The chapter has since held meetings at police stations and canceled its annual Kwanzaa celebration, which normally draws people from up and down the coast of Maine.
"'It's discouraging and it's heart-wrenching,' said Joseph Perry, president of the chapter, which has 175 members from Augusta to the Canadian border. 'There are still people who aren't comfortable, who don't feel safe.'
"The man who made the threat was Kendrick Sawyer, 75, whose doctor at a veterans hospital in Augusta reported it to the police. Mr. Sawyer also said that Maine 'should be a 'white' state,' according to court documents, and that he owned a .45-caliber handgun. No criminal charges have been filed, but law enforcement officers removed the gun from Mr. Sawyer's home in Brewer, across a river from Bangor, and the Maine attorney general's office filed a civil complaint against him."
Goodnough used this anecdote about one old man as a launching point against Maine, "the whitest state" (a position it apparently claimed from Vermont, which the Times was calling "the whitest state" until 1997) and culled four more anecdotes of racial/anti-Muslim incidents from the last two years from all over the state, which has a population of some 1.3 million. The Times has evidently never referred to any state as "the blackest state."