By Andy O’Brien Originally appeared in The Bollard, February, 2023 Think I heard my captain say Pay me my money down T’morrow is my sailin’ day Pay me my money down Wish’t I was Mr. Coffin’s son Pay me my… Read More »Radical Mainers: When Portland’s Waterfront Resounded With the Songs of Black Maritime Workers
Colby Professor Lydia Moland’s new book explores the life & career of one-time Mainer Lydia Maria Child
By Andy O’Brien Originally appeared in the April, 2023 issue of The Bollard. Late one evening in September, 1832, the rabble-rousing abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison disembarked from a ship in Portland Harbor. Garrison was fired up and ready to take… Read More »Radical Mainers: William Lloyd Garrison’s Spirited Speaking Tour of Maine
By Andy O’Brien Originally appeared in March, 2023 issue of The Bollard, On Sept. 19, 1826, an extraordinary letter signed by six African American men appeared in Portland’s Eastern Argus newspaper. It was very unusual for local papers to print… Read More »Radical Mainers: The Letter that Launched the Racial Justice Movement in Maine
By Andy O’Brien Originally published on the Maine AFL-CIO’s blog In the late 1930s, African American luggage handlers at Maine’s major rail stations in Portland, Waterville and Bangor decided it was time to get organized to fight for a fair… Read More »How Portland’s Red Caps Organized for Better Lives
The Life of John Brown Russwurm, Part III By Andy O’Brien In 1827, the year after John Brown Russwurm graduated from Bowdoin College, he and Samuel Cornish founded the New York-based Freedom’s Journal, the first Black-owned newspaper in the United States. Their… Read More »Radical Mainers: From Abolitionist to Colonizer
Celebrating the Black Revolutionaries of Haiti at a Bowdoin Commencement by Andy O’Brien In 1819, just months after John Brown Russwurm entered Hebron Academy, his studies were cut short when a fire burned down the school’s main building. Historian Carl… Read More »Radical Mainers: The Making of a Maine Abolitionist, Pan-Africanist & Pioneering Black Journalist, Part II
