Maine History Online

Civil Rights in Maine

In the last third of the century Maine's Franco-Americans, Native Americans, and African-Americans developed a new sense of ethnic awareness that brought significant gains. Franco-American cultural cohesion was at its height in the early 20th century, but nativist pressure, a protracted out-migration from the depressed New England mill towns, and persistent stereotyping and repression in schools eroded cultural awareness. Parish schools shut down, and the tight-knit "Petits Canadas" of the Northeast dispersed.

Then, ethnic pride increased. In 1972 students and community volunteers founded the Franco-American Center at the University of Maine and published the FAROG Forum, the largest circulating French-language publication in the United States. Van Buren's Acadian Village opened in 1976, and Franco-American heritage festivals and organizations dedicated to preserving Franco culture began in Lewiston-Auburn, Biddeford and other communities.

African-Americans made similar strides. In a state where blacks formed less than 1 percent of the population, racism was, in the words of civil-rights leader Gerald Talbot, "very subtle ... until it hits you in the face."

Barred from better-paying occupations, African-Americans worked typically as laborers, stevedores, waitresses, domestic servants, cooks, porters, custodians, and truckers. Civil-rights politics first surfaced in the early 1920s when Bangor-area residents established a short-lived chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Activities intensified at the end of the Second World War, partly due to the presence of black military personnel in Bangor, Brunswick, and Portland. During the late 1940s, Bangor activists formed the Penobscot Interracial Forum, and in 1947 those in Portland founded a chapter of the NAACP with ties to Maine's only black church, Green Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion. In 1959 the state passed a public accommodations bill, but its effect was limited.

In 1962 the Maine NAACP, with new chapters in Lewiston-Auburn and Brunswick, began a statewide campaign to expand the 1959 bill using mass protests, publicity, legislative lobbying, and court litigation.

In 1965 the legislature passed the Maine Fair Housing Bill, which became law in 1966, and two years later Governor Curtis established a Task Force on Human Rights, which uncovered a pattern of discrimination in education, housing, and employment. The legislature responded in 1971 with a more effective civil rights bill and a Maine Human Rights Commission.

In 1972 Portland's Gerald Talbot became the first African American elected to the Maine House of Representatives, and in 1988 William Burney, another African American, was elected mayor of Augusta. John Jenkins followed Burney in 1993 as mayor of Lewiston and became the first black state senator in Maine's history in 1996.

Maine Native Americans faced similar discrimination, coupled with a long history of dispossession from their tribal homelands. In 1957 a non-Indian began building a cabin on lands deeded to the Passamaquoddy Tribe by a 1794 treaty with Massachusetts. Roadblocks and appeals to Governor John R. Reed were unsuccessful, but the event called attention to some 6,000 acres of Passamaquoddy land that had been sold, leased, or given away in violation of the 1794 treaty.

When the Tribe filed a lawsuit in 1968, attorney Thomas Tureen discovered that the 1794 treaty itself was illegal under the federal Indian Nonintercourse Act of 1790, which prohibited all states from signing treaties with Native Americans.

This put about 60 percent of Maine's land base in dispute, and in 1975 the U.S. Department of Justice sued the state and its largest landholders on behalf of the tribe for return of the land. The size of the claim – 12.5 million acres involving 350,000 white residents – made this the most complicated land claim case in the nation's history.

The Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act, signed by President Carter in 1981, gave the Passamaquoddy Tribe, Penobscot Indian Nation, and Houlton Band of Maliseets $81.5 million, the largest settlement of its kind and the first to include provisions for the reacquisition of land.

Modern Maine: Education

Maine took a number of steps to improve education: higher teacher salaries, higher per-student expenditures, increased graduation requirements, and the 1997 Maine Learning Results that established specific learning standards. The Laptop Program, initiated in 2002, provided each middle-school student in the state with a laptop computer.

As part of a broader administrative consolidation program, Governor Kenneth Curtis brought the state's public universities and colleges together under a single board of trustees in 1968. With tuition high by national comparisons and Maine incomes relatively low, Curtis hoped to close the gap between Maine's impressive high-school graduation rate and its relatively low participation in higher education.

The new University of Maine System included the campuses in Orono and Portland. The system also included the state's five teachers' colleges at Farmington, Machias, Presque Isle, Augusta, and Fort Kent, each given university status.

Another change in the higher-education system came in 2003 with the creation of a community college network.