Perhaps its lasting impact can be divined from the fight’s 30th anniversary in 1995, when Ali revisited Lewiston, signed the gloves that Russo still possessed, took one startled look at then-Mayor John Jenkins and cracked, “How the hell did you get here?”

Jenkins, who graduated from Bates in 1974, became Lewiston’s first African-American mayor in 1993.

A native of Newark, N.J., Jenkins stayed in Lewiston after graduation and opened a martial arts school while becoming a world champion in karate and jujitsu. On the way to being elected, he studied his Maine history enough to know that Lewiston’s past had included struggles far more combative than the Ali-Liston fight. Its early French Canadian immigrants, among other non-Protestant groups, were targets of the state’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan.

Jenkins came to believe that the second Ali-Liston fight could be viewed symbolically as a moment when Lewiston, homogeneous and insular, had opened itself to the gathering forces of American social change, embodied by Ali.

“Here came Ali, at the dawn of the civil rights era, a different kind of black man, who wouldn’t let others define him and who was threatening to a whole lot of white folks,” Jenkins said. “And it was Lewiston that gave him a chance to defend his title and go from there to become the most famous person in the world.”

The city had not quite embraced Ali and, in fact, had booed him (while cheering Liston) upon entering the ring. But he received a hero’s welcome when returning in 1995, and if some of the old-timers still called him Clay, it was an unbreakable habit, a fond reference to a historical time, place and moment.

As Jenkins noted, change is time-consuming and painstaking. Resisting it, he said, often is worse.

He recalled the vacant storefronts on Lisbon Street when he became mayor, the quandary of what to do with fading landmarks like the massive Bates Mill on Canal Street, which the city took possession of in 1992 after years of unpaid taxes.

The loss of jobs and hope caused Lewiston’s population to decline to about 36,000 from more than 41,000 in its manufacturing prime. Over the past decade, the bleeding has been stanched by an infusion of Somalis from the Bantu minority group, many coming from Georgia, where they were originally resettled by the United States government. They now make up around 10 percent of the city’s population.