Gerald Talbot, a civil rights leader who rose to become Maine’s most prominent Black politician, died Saturday. He was 94.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Regina Phillips, a Portland city councilor.
Talbot was an activist during the Civil Rights Movement, championed landmark laws to fight housing and racial discrimination, and in 1972 became the state’s first Black legislator.
“Jerry was a powerful figure in the state of Maine,” said Bob Greene, an expert on Black history in Maine. “He was the first one to look at politics as a way of helping everyone.”
Talbot, an eighth-generation Mainer, was born in Bangor in 1931. After serving in the Army in the 1950s, he and his wife, Anita Cummings, settled in Portland, where they faced housing and job discrimination that informed his activism.
In 1963, Talbot was one of several notable Mainers to participate in the March on Washington, witnessing Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. As civil rights activism swelled in the South, Talbot helped spread the movement in Maine, and the next year, he revived Portland’s chapter of the NAACP from a five-year hiatus and served as its president.
“It was something we felt had to happen,” Talbot recalled to the Portland Press Herald in 2005. “As Blacks, we had nobody to go to and no voice.”
His advocacy was a major force behind the 1965 passage of a landmark Maine bill that outlawed discrimination in rental housing, three years before the federal government followed suit with the Fair Housing Act.
Talbot, appointed in 1968 to the governor’s human rights task force, was also instrumental in the creation of the Maine Human Rights Commission and in passing the Maine Human Rights Act.
In 1972, he made history when he was elected as a Democrat to the Maine House, where he represented Portland for three terms. Prior to his 1978 departure from the Legislature, he sponsored notable bills that included the state’s first attempts at gay rights legislation and an act to eradicate racial slurs from all maps and location names in Maine.
In addition to his time in politics and activism, Talbot also spent 25 years working in printing for the Guy Gannett Publishing Company — at the time the owner of the Press Herald — before retiring in 1991.
Talbot had four daughters, one of whom, Rachel Talbot Ross, followed in her father’s footsteps and was elected to the Maine House in 2016. In 2022, she became Maine’s first Black House speaker.
Talbot was also passionate about preserving and highlighting Black history in Maine, curating artifacts, photos, posters and documents throughout his life. In 1995, he donated his vast collection to the University of Southern Maine’s archives. That same year, the university named an auditorium after him and honored him with an honorary doctorate. USM created a fellowship examining race in Maine in Talbot’s honor in 2019.
Compiling some of the long-neglected history of race in the state alongside historian H.H. Price, Talbot edited the anthology “Maine’s Visible Black History: The First Chronicle of Its People,” a sweeping history of Black Mainers and their influence on the state.
Talbot also served on the Maine State Board of Education from 1980-1984 and was its chair in 1984. To honor his contributions to education, the city and the state, Portland in 2020 renamed Riverton Elementary School as the Gerald E. Talbot Community School.
“Whether you’re Black or white or green or red, we’re all people and we all need the same thing: equality,” Talbot, then 89, said at the naming ceremony.
Talbot was steadfast in his beliefs across his long life, championing justice both in Augusta and across the state, said Greene, the historian, who also knew Talbot personally.
“Jerry has always been Jerry,” Greene said. “You knew where he stood, and it was always for what was right.”
