Bangor’s blacks come to the fore

BLACK BANGOR, AFRICAN AMERICANS IN A MAINE COMMUNITY, 1880-1950, by Maureen Elgersman Lee, University Press of New England, 2005, 177 pages, paperback, $22.

Maureen Elgersman Lee’s new book on the black community in Bangor between 1880 and 1950 is an important addition to our understanding of minorities in Maine and how they fared. Blacks, along with most other racial and ethnic minorities with the possible exception of the Irish and French Canadians, have been nearly invisible in recountings of the state’s past. In less than 180 pages, Lee has brought this small group to the fore in one city, showing how its members participated in economic life while preserving a sense of their own community.

“While the black population remains substantial [320 individuals in 2000] – even larger than it was in 1930 [228] – most of the institutions that defined Black life in the previous century are gone. Various family names such as Dymond, Johnson and Talbot are still found in the city directory, but Black Bangor’s golden age is clearly over,” writes Lee, a history professor at the University of Southern Maine.

What exactly was this golden age? For starters, Lee names individuals and tells what they did. Despite the institutionalized racism that existed everywhere, a few Bangor blacks managed to cross boundaries. Milton Roscoe Geary, for example, was Maine’s first black lawyer and the only lawyer who was also an ordained minister. W. Alonzo Johnson, a businessman whose striking photograph appears on the book’s cover, played viola and violin in the Bangor Symphony Orchestra for more than 25 years. Fred W. Matheas earned a degree in civil engineering from the University of Maine and became a railroad engineer. More recently, Gerry Talbot became Maine’s first African American legislator.

There are other examples of this sort of outstanding achievement, but their significance should not be exaggerated. “Although black men and women were employed across the labor spectrum distinct features are discernible. There were few black professionals. Black men from Canada often worked in the lumber or pulp and paper industries; those from the United States often

worked for the railroad industry. Black women found their primary employment in domestic service work, even if they had professional training,” writes Lee. For example, Linda Brooks Davis was educated at the New England Conservatory of Music, yet, after working as a music teacher for several years, she found it more economically rewarding to become the attendant in the ladies room at the train station. Some blacks with University of Maine degrees had to leave the state to find teaching jobs in black schools, although it should be noted Bangor for a time employed one of only two women black teachers in Maine.

This is not a book about individual Bangor blacks, however. It’s a book about a community of blacks. “Black Bangor’s greatest achievements were in the creation of their institutions … It is also here that the community’s decline would be most deeply felt after the 1940s,” writes Lee. For instance, local blacks formed chapters of such predominantly white organizations as Mothers’ Clubs, the Odd Fellows and the Masons.

Some of their activity was aimed quietly at thwarting racism. They formed the second Maine chapter of the NAACP in the 1920s at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was active in the state. When the local USO center denied access to blacks at Dow Air Force Base, they organized a center for African American military personnel. They organized something called the Tarragona Club, probably because the wealthy members of the Tarratine Club did not allow blacks to join or did not make them feel welcome, Lee speculates.

For a time they had a semiprofessional basketball team called the Carver Club that played across the state. One of Lee’s interviewees recounted how a “riot” erupted in Woodland when the team “with its Harlem Globetrotters style” made a mockery of the local team and had to be escorted out of town by state police and sheriff’s deputies.

One aspect of life where Bangor blacks did not feel the need to form their own institution was religion. Unlike blacks in many cities, Bangor blacks joined several local churches instead of creating their own. While many of them lived in the neighborhood around Parker Street, blacks also lived in all city neighborhoods.

Lee’s book is well-illustrated with handsome photographs of several members of Bangor’s black population and the places where they lived and worked. But on Page 82 appears a century-old advertisement so shocking it does not seem to go with the rest of the book, which on the whole, plays down the level of raw, violent racism that permeated American society. A photograph of a smiling black man dominates an advertisement presented in 1901 in the Bangor city directory by M. Lynch Co., which sold safes. Underneath the photo in bold letters is the headline “All Coons Look Alike.” The text explains that all safes are not alike. “Using the logic that the average person could not tell law-abiding African Americans from dangerous, predatory ones, the advertisement preyed on American’s suspicion of Blacks,” writes Lee.

This bit of cultural obscenity offers evidence that while lynchings did not occur in Maine and while blacks were tolerated and sometimes venerated, the ugliest sorts of racism still existed just below the surface. Back then, in an era when the daily newspaper might put an anti-lynching editorial near a review praising a local minstrel show, such displays were taken for granted. But Malcolm Geary and Alonzo Johnson and many other less distinguished black residents of the Queen City, from the boot blacks to the barbers to the porters, recognized it for exactly what it was and had to live with it daily.

Dr. Maureen Elgersman Lee will present a lecture about the African American community in Bangor in its heyday, and will sign copies of her book, 5:30-7 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 15, at the Bangor Museum and Center for History, 6 State St., Bangor. Wayne Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.