Talk opens Black History Month

BANGOR – A dozen people gathered on Feb. 4 at Bangor Public Library to hear a lecture that kicked off the library’s observance of Black History Month. Maureen Elgersman Lee talked about research that culminated in her recently published book, “Black Bangor: African Americans in a Maine Community, 1880-1950.”

Elgersman Lee is an associate professor and faculty scholar for the African American Collection of Maine at the University of Southern Maine. Her interest in the subject was fostered by the Gerald Talbot Collection at USM. Talbot is a Bangor native.

When she began the project six years ago, it was in the form of a photography exhibit of African Americans who had lived in Bangor. Many of the individuals in the photos were unidentified.

“We made some headway,” in identifying people in the photos, Elgersman Lee said. “But more than that, memories came to the fore.” And people told her stories about life in Bangor as members of the black community. She realized then that the project might be broader than the scholarly article she had originally envisioned.

Her work was informed by interviews she did in the Bangor area with Earl Johnson, Dorothy Simmons, Gerald Talbot, Sterling Dymond Jr., Lloyd George, Herbert Heughan and H. Althea Warner Mendel.

Her job, she said, was to capture the essence of a community. “It was humbling,” she said of the experience, “to give a community its history, to give that to the people who lived it – because you can’t fully capture or recreate history.”

In planning the book, Elgersman Lee had to set certain parameters for her work. She decided to begin her research at the year 1880 because she wanted distance from the Civil War when many former slaves came north to find new lives. She decided not to research past 1950 because that was the year when census records reflected a drop in African American population in Bangor, from 228 at its peak to 112.

Elgersman Lee’s book focuses on four areas of research – migration, labor, daily life and institutions. She found that most of Bangor’s blacks migrated from Canada and their move to Maine was fueled by the need for work. The migrants found work in the woods, on steamships and with the railroads.

Others migrated north from other Eastern Seaboard states and a handful came from the Caribbean.

Elgersman Lee believes that this migration was part of what is known as The Great Migration, when southern blacks left rural areas and settled in large northern cities like Chicago and New York, but she will need to do more research to determine how it all fits together.

The kind of work African American immigrants to Bangor found included jobs in the professions, such as law and teaching; in the middle class, such as running business as teamsters, or as dressmakers; or in the working class as railroad porters, railroad station matrons, washerwomen, cooks, chefs and stewards.

The jobs working class blacks held, Elgersman Lee said, often “masked the realities of their lives” and did not reflect their standing or importance in the black community, or “the dignity of their daily lives. Your job is not who you are.”

Elgersman Lee said she felt “a sense of awe” when her research uncovered the institutions that so small a population established. Those organizations included a Bangor chapter of the NAACP in 1921, which had 54 charter members and needed 50 to maintain the charter, the Masons, the Oddfellows, and the Mothers Club, a group that worked together for charity, but left no paper trail which Elgersman Lee could study.

While Bangor’s African American community suffered the same racial prejudice that blacks in all parts of the United States were subject to, Elgersman Lee said that on the whole blacks in Bangor had a high quality of life and that the good outweighed the bad.

Elgersman Lee said doing the research and writing the book presented a challenge – how to translate raw data from U.S. census reports, Bangor High School yearbooks and city directories into a narrative. What she learned about the process revealed to her that she wants to continue to do writing that localizes the black experience. She passes on what she has learned to her students.

“I ask them to reconstruct the life and times of an individual based on one obituary,” she said.