African-Americans Many blacks emigrated from New Brunswick seeking work

Waves of European immigrants swept into the United States to escape the poverty and oppression of their homelands around the turn of the 20th century. This six-part series, which began Saturday, focuses on how Bangor, as an example of one Maine community, experienced this rush of humanity. Today’s story looks at some of the experiences of the African-American families whose descendants still live in the Queen City.

The third of six parts

Sterling Dymond settled in Bangor in 1897 after working on one of the log drives. Three years later, he asked his wife-to-be, Janie Simmons, to come down from New Brunswick and join him, and they were married in 1901. Janie’s cousin Johnnie Patterson was also a noted river driver. Thirty or 40 blacks worked in the woods and on the drives, according to their son Sterling.

Both Dymond and Simmons were from Fredericton, New Brunswick, according to Sterling 2nd, who at age 87 was referred to as “Bangor’s black historian” by Gerald Talbot and H.H. Price in the new book “Maine’s Visible Black History.” Today he lives on Walter Street, in the same neighborhood where he grew up and where several black families lived during the first half of the 20th century.

Nearly all of Bangor’s black foreign immigrant population in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was from Canada – Fredericton, Kingsclear and Woodstock, New Brunswick, according to Maureen Elgersman Lee in her book “Black Bangor: African Americans in a Maine Community, 1880-1950,” the second volume on Maine’s African-Americans to appear in 2006. The Canadians made up more than a third of Bangor’s black population, which numbered approximately 205 in 1910. Most of them arrived here looking for work between 1885 and 1910.

It’s tempting to think these new Bangoreans were descended from slaves who escaped before the Civil War, but such was not the case, according to Lee. “The majority of Blacks who left New Brunswick and shaped Black Bangor were not the fugitive slaves of the 1850s or their children, but more than likely the descendants of eighteenth and nineteenth-century-era Blacks – possibly free or enslaved Loyalists,” she wrote. Many had lived in Canada for generations.

The first Sterling Dymond, the logger, got a job working for Great Northern Paper Co. managing a lumber camp supply warehouse at Kineo for 10 years in the 1920s and then with the Bangor Public Works Department for 15 years. He and Janie had 10 children, most of whom left the area to get good jobs as shipbuilders, construction workers or railroad employees, following the same routes whites had been taking out of Maine for generations.

They were also patriots. At a recent Penobscot Valley Senior College class in the series called “Into the Melting Pot,” Dymond proudly displayed the cloth banner that his mother placed in the window of their home at the corner of Parker and Fourth streets during World War II. Four stars showed four Dymond boys – Edward, Simmons, Kenneth and Paul – were in the military – in segregated units, of course. When Sterling 2nd tried to enlist, however, he was rejected. The recruitment officer, besides pointing out a minor physical defect, told him his family had supplied enough men for the cause.

Blacks in Bangor formed a cohesive group with their own social clubs and sports teams. Dymond’s mother was a member of the Mother’s Club, whose members knitted mittens and blankets for the needy and put on picnics and Christmas parties for children. There was a black Masonic chapter, of which Sterling 2nd was the worshipful master for a time, and an Odd Fellows chapter. There was even the Tarragona Club, which Lee speculates in her book was formed because Bangor’s famous Tarratine Club admitted only privileged white men. Dymond’s father was an active member.

Sterling 2nd was a president of the local chapter of the NAACP. Racism in Maine was ingrained, but far more muted than in the South where lynchings and race riots were common occurrences. Booker T. Washington spoke at City Hall before a large crowd, and Jack Johnson put on an exhibition fight in Millinocket in the first decade of the 20th century.

But underneath the surface, there was plenty of racial feeling. The Bangor Daily News may have editorialized against the lynchings and other forms of mistreatment in the South, but minstrel shows were a common form of entertainment at home. The Ku Klux Klan briefly erupted in Maine in the 1920s, its vitriol aimed at everyone not white and Protestant.

Bangor was an integrated city physically, but not mentally. Blacks went to school and church with whites. They lived throughout the city, not in segregated neighborhoods. Most black families owned their own homes. Yet during World War II, a United Service Organization chapter for blacks had to be formed because the local chapter was segregated.

When Dymond graduated from Bangor High School, there were six African-Americans in his class and six in the class behind his, he recalled. But black and white students didn’t mix socially. “Today things have really opened up, and it’s good,” he said.

After schooling, much bigger problems arose such as finding places to live and jobs where a person had some hope of getting promoted, said Dymond.

“Discrimination was there … You couldn’t get a job in Freese’s. You couldn’t get a job in any of the stores in Bangor. You worked for the railroad. You were a laborer or in construction work,” he said. “They would all hire you as a janitor, but they didn’t want to give you anything else.” Hence, Linda Brooks Davis, who attended the New England Conservatory of Music, worked as a ladies restroom attendant at Union Station, according to Lee’s book.

Starting out as a shoeshine boy on Main Street, Dymond eventually worked as a baggage handler, a porter, a cook, a janitor and at other jobs, sometimes as foreman, for Northeast Airlines, Dow Air Force Base, the railroads and other employers. At the old Union Station, his most memorable experiences included assisting famous people such as John D. Rockefeller and Louis Armstrong. At Dow, he “took care of the president’s [Lyndon B. Johnson’s] plane twice.”

Education, as well as the civil rights movement, provided a route upward for the Dymonds. Before Dow closed in 1968, Dymond took engineering courses at the University of Maine and got a federal job as an engineering technician with the Soil Conservation Service where he drafted plans for and inspected the construction of flood control dams throughout Maine. He did that for 18 years.

He and his wife also reared three children, all of whom went to college. Dymond said he could name a dozen African-Americans who went to the University of Maine and then had to move south to get teaching jobs because they could not get them in Maine.

Today, his daughter Nancy is the first African-American with a University of Maine degree to teach in the Bangor school system, Dymond said.

Next: Greeks ran many businesses.