Wiscasset selectmen and Maine’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous, and Tribal Populations will keep in touch on plans to honor James Weldon Johnson. After hearing from the commission’s director of community-engaged research, Meadow Dibble, Dec. 21, selectmen told Town Manager Dennis Simmons to have Wiscasset’s Lucia Droby show them a proposed design for a plaque honoring the poet-civil rights advocate who died in a 1938 car-train crash downtown.

Selectmen mulled a workshop with Dibble and did not set one. Members noted they have been waiting for Droby to meet with the board again. Selectman Dusty Jones said the plaque has a design and donations. Fellow member Pam Dunning said she had seen no design.

The idea to honor Johnson in Wiscasset dates back years, most recently to fall 2020 when Simmons said a representative for Florida Congressman Al Lawson told him Johnson’s birth city, Jacksonville, planned to honor Johnson with a monument and a park that would open in 2022, and the hope was to also mark where he died. Then Droby approached the board in May.

In a phone interview Sunday, Droby confirmed donations have been lined up for a marker and this fall she worked with a sculptor on its possible design. That is as far as she has gone with it; next, everyone needs to “come to an understanding” on whether the town or the months-old Maine commission’s, upcoming James Weldon Johnson Observance Task Force will be in charge of the marker, she said.

She is fine with either; this just needs to be determined, Droby told Wiscasset Newspaper. “And one way or another, the effort I put into (the marker) has helped us get to this point.”

In the Dec. 21 Zoom meeting, Selectman Terry Heller said the local effort began before a state law this year made an annual James Weldon Johnson Day starting next June 17. The two efforts need to “track together,” Heller said. “We got started before (the state) got started.”

Dibble told selectmen she wants everyone in town to feel good about the collaboration. “There’s no way ... we want to move forward with this project without (that),” she said.

“Wiscasset in our view really could serve as the epicenter of a very important event and annual observance connected (with) cultural (and) educational programming,” Dibble told the board. “This will have a statewide resonance (and) be connected with national remembrance efforts. And there are wonderful opportunities for cultural heritage tourism.” Juneteenth, a new, paid state holiday, comes two days after James Weldon Johnson Day, she said. “So there’s an opportunity here to really do something big and in concert (with that).”

The commission wants to support, not put a wrench into, local plans, she said; it wants to give Wiscasset’s effort “a statewide stage” in hopes other towns and cities will embrace James Weldon Johnson Day, and black history will no longer be relegated to February, Black History Month. “Maine has a black history and Wiscasset has a connection to that history, a very important one.”

In another development, the commission Dec. 22 emailed another call for applicants to the task force. “We are very excited to begin our work together in the new year. It has come to our attention that not everyone who initially expressed interest ... received (this) message, so we’re broadcasting the call once more before convening the group in 2022,” the email stated.