Not in the mainstream media: Arab-American sworn into Lackawanna office

Arab-American sworn into Lackawanna office

Well, this is good.

Arab-American sworn into Lackawanna office
By Dale Anderson
NEWS STAFF REPORTER
Updated: January 05, 2010, 10:13 pm / 19 comments
Published: January 04, 2010, 6:36 am

It was proud day Sunday for Abdulsalam Noman.

Before a crowd of about 200 family members and friends from Lackawanna’s Yemenite community, the incoming First Ward Council member took the oath of office on his father’s copy of the Quran and became the city’s first Arab-American elected government official.

He’s also the first Arab-American elected to public office in New York State and only the second in the nation. The first was in Michigan.

Lackawanna, which counts 4,000 Yemenites among its 18,000 population, also has elected two Arab- American School Board members, one of whom currently serves on the board.

All of Noman’s five brothers, including the one from Michigan, and three sisters attended the ceremony in Curly’s Banquet Facility on Ridge Road. Lackawanna City Judge Frederic Marrano swore in Noman.

Missing were only his uncle in Arizona, who wasn’t feeling well enough to make the trip, and his father, Kassim, who died in November, two weeks after Noman was elected.

“I’m proud to be an American citizen,” the new Council member said Sunday.

Noman came to Lackawanna from Yemen in 1975 with his mother and one of his sisters, two years after his father emigrated. They followed his uncle, who came to work in the steel plant in the 1950s, and another sister. The other brothers and sister came later.

He graduated from Lackawanna High School and earned a history degree at the University at Buffalo in 1986. Now the father of four, he has been a teacher’s aide and Arabic translator for the Lackawanna City School District, and the high school soccer coach, a job not nearly as bruising as the campaign for the First Ward Council seat.

“It was a tough election,” he said Sunday night. “There were four running in the primary and three candidates in November. It helped that the endorsed Democrat [Joseph Jerge, whom he defeated in the primary] threw his support behind me.”

Among his hopes as a Council member is to add more diversity to the city’s work force, which currently has only two Arab-Americans.

As for the troubles in his native land, he said he’ll be glad to see the United States send military aid to the Yemenite government.

“What’s going on over there is unacceptable,” he said. “I’d like to see the United States root it out. I support President Obama 100 percent.”