AUGUSTA, Maine — Saying political allies should “storm the capitol” in protest, House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross used a Juneteenth event to rail against Gov. Janet Mills’ administration for not yet implementing a Black history law she championed.
It has prompted a defense from the Maine Department of Education, which said it has worked in good faith to enact the law and that it was “saddened” by the remarks from Maine’s first Black speaker.
The comments were notable both for Talbot Ross’ incendiary rhetoric invoking the image of the U.S. Capitol riots of Jan. 6, 2021, and for allegations of racism leveled at an executive branch controlled by a fellow Democrat. The remarks also mark a low point in the relationship between the progressive House speaker and the more moderate Mills, who have butted heads in recent weeks.
They were first reported by The Maine Wire, the news arm of the conservative Maine Policy Institute that posted stitched-together videos of the speaker among a crowd at an event hosted on Monday at the University of Southern Maine in her home city of Portland.
After a representative of the education department spoke at the event, Talbot Ross launched into a criticism of the agency over her law passed in 2021 that requires African American studies and the history of genocide be placed into the state’s K-12 education standards.
Those subjects are not yet in the standards, but the department has said they will be after a revision of the social studies section that began this year. There was no deadline in the bill.
Those standards serve as guiding documents for school districts that make final decisions on curriculum, part of Maine’s tradition of local control. The House speaker said the state is dragging its feet on the law in part due to a “supremacist” attitude, saying it was “an atrocity” that a teacher who does not want to address the subject could simply refuse.
“We should be storming the capitol — really, I’m serious — because what the Department of Education has done is, it’s made excuses for not teaching our children the truth about this country, this soil that we’re on now and the labor that made our economies possible,” she said.
A Talbot Ross spokesperson said she had to talk to the speaker before offering a comment on Thursday. Mills’ office did not respond to questions about the remarks, while the education department offered a lengthy statement on the implementation of the Black history law.
It said the department was “saddened by the Speaker’s comments because we believe they do not reflect the work of the Maine Department of Education or educators across Maine to implement the law.”
The department has worked with educators to pull together resources on the subject, convened an advisory group and brought together 12 educators that will develop digital modules on Black history in Maine to be piloted in the upcoming school year.
“The Maine Department of Education is fulfilling its obligations under the law and remains committed to the important and necessary work to ensure that teachers have the resources and supports they need to integrate African American history and culture and diverse voices into their instruction at all grade levels,” spokesperson Marcus Mrowka said.
The measure from Talbot Ross was a relatively non-controversial item when it was passed. During testimony at that time, she recounted the story of her father, Gerald Talbot, who was Maine’s first Black lawmaker and donated his personal papers to USM.
She said many schools barely teach examples of Black history in the country’s whitest state, including examples such as the 1912 removal of a community of Black and white residents who had married and lived together on Malaga Island.
“We can do better,” she said then. “This is a story that must be corrected and made visible.”
Talbot Ross and Mills have staked out opposite positions on many of the top issues facing lawmakers in Augusta, including gun control and a tribal-rights push that the speaker is leading and the governor opposes. In May, Talbot Ross threatened to oppose a spending plan if Mills did not reverse her position on tribal rights.
