Steve Wessler, 1951-2025

 

Stephen Wessler, a life-long advocate for civil and human rights in Maine and around the U.S. and the world, died on March 10, 2025, at the age of 73, after living with Alzheimer’s disease. He was surrounded by family and friends and was at peace.

Steve believed that acts of courage and decency, small or large, can bring some justice or repair to an ailing and often cruel world. He acted on that belief with rigor and unflinching integrity and held that it was the obligation of others to do the same. Despite or perhaps because of his focus on bigotry and violence, Steve filled his life with beauty, which he found on the pages of great novels, in the music of John Coltrane, on the mountains and lakes of Maine, and in his love for his sons and his granddaughters.

Steve was born in 1951, the second of three sons of Stanford and Margaret Wessler, a doctor and a social worker. He grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in St. Louis, Missouri. He often said that his commitment to justice was seeded while sitting with his mother as a child watching evening news reports of Alabama police turning fire hoses on black children, and of civil rights activists murdered by racists in Mississippi.

After his undergraduate education at Harvard College, Steve attended law school at Boston University, intent on becoming a civil rights lawyer. It would take him some time to achieve that goal, because it was complicated by another commitment: to live in proximity to nature. He applied for jobs in Maine and Vermont. When the Maine Attorney General’s office offered him an interview, he said he would happily take any job except in the tax division. He was offered a tax division job. He took it. Hikes awaited.

In 1979, Steve left to join the small-town law office of his friend Mike Levey, where he learned how to be an effective litigator and advocate. Steve returned to the Attorney General’s office after three years to lead the consumer protection division, bringing cases against colluding and monopolistic businesses. It was during this time that Steve became a father. He loved his sons, Nate and Seth, with his whole being, and he was utterly dedicated to inculcating in them his passions for jazz, the outdoors, and justice.

In the early 1990s, Steve received an offer so remarkable that he would later say it almost made him believe in something like fate—the Attorney General asked if he would develop and direct a new civil rights enforcement unit. Among Steve’s proudest accomplishments was a case against a massive egg farm that had barred Latino migrant workers from the right to meet in their company-owned housing with labor advocates, clergy and legal aid attorneys. After a hard-fought battle, Steve and his colleagues won a powerful decision from Maine’s high court, which recognized the “atmosphere of fear and intimidation” the company’s actions caused.

Most of Steve’s civil rights lawyering focused on securing restraining orders against perpetrators of hate crimes. He co-launched the Civil Rights Team Project, a hate violence prevention program that operated in over 150 Maine schools. His work put him in direct contact with the emotional and physical tolls of bias-motivated harassment, discrimination and violence, and for the rest of his life he was haunted by the impacts of many of the attacks he responded to.

In 1999, Steve left the Attorney General’s office to found and direct the Center for Preventing Hate at the University of Southern Maine, where he was also a professor of policy. The Center, which later became an independent non-profit, worked in schools and communities across the U.S. and Europe. The Center was premised on the idea that stopping hate violence required interrupting bias and changing cultures. “Too often we think of the perpetrators as evil aberrations,” Steve said in a talk years later. “But acts like those do not erupt out of thin air. . . . They grow out of the biases and prejudices that are part of our society.”

Steve is the author of The Respectful School, a book for educators, and of numerous advocacy reports and articles. He helped draft and pilot a Justice Department training curriculum on responding to hate crimes. In the years following 9/11, he served on the board of the ACLU of Maine, which earlier had given Steve its Scolnik Award for his civil rights advocacy.

Though the Center closed in 2011, Steve continued his work as an advocate, educator, public speaker and trainer. He taught courses on conflict resolution and hate crimes in the University of Maine system and at George Mason University. In Northern Ireland, Steve focused on sectarian conflict in schools. Across eastern Europe, he worked to ensure compliance with human rights standards in counter-terrorism policing and to interrupt rampant anti-Roma bias and police violence.

Underlying all of Steve’s social justice commitments was his Jewish identity, which became increasingly important to him as he aged. For him, being Jewish was about justice, and later in life, he stressed to anyone who would listen, in person or through writing, that this included justice for Palestinians. In November 2023, he travelled to Washington, DC, to join hundreds of thousands of others in protest of American support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

Steve moved from central Maine to Bar Harbor in 2011, to live close to his beloved Acadia National Park. For over a decade, Steve taught courses on human rights, including on genocide, anti-immigrant bias and religious intolerance, to undergraduates at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. His students’ curiosity was an enduring pleasure. He would climb a mountain, walk the carriage paths, or paddle across a lake nearly every day, often accompanied by his partner, Carol. Their relationship was a source of deep joy.

In 2023, Steve was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, a disease he had feared since his own father was diagnosed with dementia decades earlier. But Steve believed that fear was a precursor to courage. He published an opinion essay in the Boston Globe calling out stigma about Alzheimer’s, and urging greater humanity toward people with his diagnosis.

In his final months, he lived with his sons and their partners—about whom he felt deep pride, and whose work in public interest law and journalism gave him hope—and their children in New York City. Together they filled Steve’s life with visits with family and dear friends, live jazz, delicious meals and a tremendous amount of laughter. Steve found humor in the absurd, and anyone who got to know him knew that he had a tell: before he’d deliver a joke, often to break heaviness or discomfort, Steve’s mighty nostrils would flare. His nose flared a hell of a lot in his final months. His granddaughters adored him and Steve reveled in their company, their humor, their love, and their care. He said often he thought he was lucky.

Steve is survived by his sons, Nate and Seth, and their partners Zainab and Diala, his granddaughters Laila and Maha, his brothers John and Jim and their spouses Fredi and Susan, his partner of more than a decade Carol, the mother of his children and his former spouse Ellen, his former spouse Beth, his niece and nephews and their families, and a small group of dear friends who, to Steve, were family too.

Steve wouldn’t much have liked for people to send flowers. The greatest source of distress in his final months was in witnessing the devastating effect on people’s lives of the Trump administration’s policies. He asked that donations be made in his honor to Preble Street (www.preblestreet.org), which addresses homelessness and hunger in Maine, or the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (www.ilapmaine.org), which provides direct representation to immigrants in Maine.