LEWISTON – Carrie Hull-Chandler was walking from her job on Ash Street to her apartment on Lisbon Street when she felt someone pointing at her.

The little girl was sitting in the back of a car stopped at a light.

Hull-Chandler walked by with her head down, as she did every night during her walk home. She could see the little girl’s finger in the corner of her eye.

Hull-Chandler couldn’t hear the girl. But she knew what she was saying: “Look, a black lady.”

It was at that moment that Hull-Chandler decided she would never again walk with her head down.

“I said to myself, ‘Why do I do that? Why am I feeling insecure?'” Hull-Chandler recalled.

These days, when the 61-year-old retiree feels someone staring at her, she smiles and waves.

“I hold my head high because I am somebody,” she said.

A tall woman with rosy cheeks and manicured hands, Hull-Chandler is one of 10 people featured in an exhibit opening Monday at Lewiston-Auburn College.

The exhibit, “Home is Where I Make It: Race and Labor in Lewiston and Auburn, Maine,” tells the stories of 10 African-Americans who have lived here for at least 10 years.

Maureen Elgersman Lee, an assistant history professor at the University of Southern Maine and the faculty scholar for the African-American Archives of Maine, organized the project. She believed that a significant part of Lewiston-Auburn’s history – the stories of local African-Americans – had never been told.

Lewiston was home to one of the state’s largest black populations in the 1800s, and the Twin Cities currently has the second largest population of African-Americans in the state. Despite these facts, Lee said, the history of local African-Americans hasn’t received nearly as much attention as the history of blacks in Portland and Bangor.

Among the 10 people featured in the exhibit are a reverend, a teacher, a stay-at-home mom and a former mayor of Lewiston.

Some have lived in Maine their entire lives. Others came here as children or young adults.

Hull-Chandler was born in Virginia. In 1949, her mother decided to move her family to Boston, Mass., because she wanted her kids to live in a place where they could share bathrooms with white people and take any seat on a bus.

While in high school, then while taking night classes at a business college, Hull-Chandler worked two part-time jobs to take care of her mother, who suffered from debilitating arthritis after years of cooking and cleaning houses for other people.

In the early 1960s, Hull-Chandler drove to Portland for a long weekend, after plans for another vacation fell through. While there, she visited a local church and met her future husband.

“I never dreamed in my lifetime that I would live in the state of Maine,” Hull-Chandler said.

When Hull-Chandler’s husband, who lived in Auburn at the time, asked her to marry him, he gave her a choice: Maine or Boston. She chose Maine.

“I wanted a new atmosphere,” she said. “I felt I could fit in anywhere.”

The couple moved to Lewiston, and Hull-Chandler got a job at New England Telephone, where she worked for 29 years.

She has only left the area once. When New England Telephone transferred her to Portland, she got an apartment in that city to avoid the commute.

But, as soon as she retired in 1995, she packed up and came right back.

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