Gerald Talbot, the son of Bangor who was Maine’s first Black legislator and spent decades forcing the state to confront quiet, persistent forms of discrimination, died Saturday at age 94.
Talbot, a Democrat, is best known for representing part of Portland for three terms in the Maine House of Representatives from 1972 to 1978. He was born in Bangor, where his father’s side of the family had lived for generations, tracing its Maine ancestry back to a Black Revolutionary War veteran named Abraham Talbett.
Housing and job discrimination pushed him into a leading role in Maine’s civil rights movement of the 1960s, when there were fewer than 3,000 Black people here. He advocated for the state’s Fair Housing Act of 1965, which came three years before a similar federal law. In the Legislature, he was among the first to advocate for gay rights.
“It’s sort of like when Jackie Robinson broke into Major League Baseball,” Talbot told the Associated Press after winning his first election. “I guess I know today just how Robinson felt.”
His father, W. Edgarton Talbot, was the head chef at the Bangor House hotel on the south side of downtown Bangor. His mother, Arvella, was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where the Underground Railroad fueled a notable Black community that was linked to Bangor. She graduated from Bangor High School in 1929.
The younger Talbot remembered growing up in a diverse neighborhood. He graduated high school in 1952, served three years in the Army and moved to Portland for work and to pursue a young woman — his future wife, Anita — whom he had met while playing football in the city.
Finding a home and a job proved difficult. When he landed steady work in 1966 at the publisher of the Portland Press Herald as a compositor, he later learned that the telephone company had twice turned him down not because he failed its test, as he was told, but because he was active in the NAACP.
That activism became the central part of his public life. Talbot helped found the Portland NAACP chapter in 1964 and led it as president three times. He was at the March on Washington in 1963. He advocated for the housing bill and the creation of the Maine Human Rights Commission under Democratic Gov. Ken Curtis.
He lost a race for the Portland City Council in 1971, deciding to run for the Legislature the following year after visiting the State House and watching a lawmaker argue that it was good for poor people to struggle. No one challenged him.
In Augusta, he sat surrounded by 88 Democratic white legislators and began piling up a record. He chaired the Human Resources Committee for two terms, working five-hour night shifts at the newspaper to keep his union insurance.
He sponsored Maine’s first Martin Luther King Jr. holiday legislation. He also sponsored the first gay-rights amendment to the Maine Human Rights Act. He passed a law banning racial slurs from all geographic names in the state, erasing words from roughly a dozen place names where they had lingered under the argument that they were historical.
“There are many ways a lawmaker can help heighten society’s sensitivity to minority groups,” the Bangor Daily News editorialized against the change. “Rewriting history is not one of them.”
Talbot left the Legislature in 1978. He founded a group that did Black history education across the state, telling an interviewer in 2001 that he often loaded his van with artifacts and drove across Maine to show students a history their textbooks underplayed or ignored.
In 1995, he donated 25 boxes of collected material to the University of Southern Maine, which became the foundation of a diversity center there. He and a historian wrote a Black history of Maine published in 2006.
In 2020, Portland renamed the Riverton Elementary School as the Gerald E. Talbot Community School. A park in Bangor is named for him. His daughter, state Sen. Rachel Talbot Ross, D-Portland, became Maine’s first Black House speaker in 2022, continuing his work on Black education and place-name initiatives.
Talbot, who is survived by Anita and his four daughters, including Portland City Councilor Regina Phillips, was never entirely satisfied with how far Maine had come.
“We’ve come a long distance,” he said in 2001. “And we’ve got a long distance to go.”
