LAND OF THE FREE?

Maine, 1912.

Via Benjamin Shallop

July 1 

On this day in 1912 what is arguably one of the most revolting racist acts in the history of New England occurred when the entire mixed race population of Malaga Island Maine was committed to an insane asylum for being “degenerate.” What follows is a very uncomfortable history that YOU need to know and acknowledge, especially if you are a New Englander like me.

Malaga Island is located at the eastern extremity of Casco Bay in Maine. Nobody is really certain when the black community of Malaga Island was first settled, or even where the name comes from. Local legend has it that a Spanish ship named Malaga was shipwrecked there in the 1700’s and the crew was rescued by a local black fishermen who was given the island as a reward for his heroism, but there is no documentation to back this up. There was a free black man named Benjamin Darling who did own property on a nearby Island in 1794 and he may be the source of that legend. What is certain is that by the time of the 1860’s Malaga Island had become home to a poor but thriving little community of Black families and Scottish and Irish Immigrant families who hacked out a meager yet by all accounts happy living through cod fishing, lobster fishing, and subsistence farming. The population of the island appears to have been originally and predominantly black with the immigrant arrivals being welcomed into the community later. This poor but welcoming and happy island was pretty much left alone for most of it’s existence. Over time the population intermarried and became mostly racially mixed.

Towards the end of the 19th Century things started to change for the worse for the inhabitants of Malaga Island. Tourism was emerging as a new industry in Maine, and word began to spread of the mixed race “mongrel Malagates” on the island. Some tourists would charter boats to explore the bay and soon enough catching a glimpse of the mixed raced islanders became as much a part of the tour as seeing a seal or a whale. Local newspapers and officials began to take the view that the inhabitants of Malaga Island were a blight on the Maine they were trying to promote. Local Newspapers ran headlines like “Homeless Island of Beautiful Casco Bay – It’s shiftless population of half breeds,” “Queer Folk of the Maine Coast,” and even Harper's Weekly ran several stories about the state of Maine’s efforts to deal with the Malaga problem. Even the term “Malagate” began to be used as a very local racial slur in a manner similar to the “N-word.” In an effort to prove that the Malaga Islanders were not feeble minded degenerates, in the first decade of the 20th century the islanders erected a simple one room school on the island and hired a teacher. Soon enough the island could boast of having a higher literacy rate than the average for rural Maine at that time, but that didn’t make any difference to the authorities who couldn’t see beyond their racial bias.

In 1911 the Governor of Maine, Frederick Plaisted, visited the island. Afterwards in an interview with the Brunswick Times he said; “The best plan would be to burn down the shacks with all their filth. Certainly the conditions are not credible to our state, and we ought not to have such things on our front door, and I do not think that a like condition can be found elsewhere in Maine, although there are some pretty bad localities elsewhere.” It must be noted (though it should be unnecessary) that photos of the island homes at the time and archaeological excavations later show that there were no shacks, but well constructed modest New England homes and cottages not at all dissimilar to what would be found in any other fishing community in New England at that time. Governor Plaisted ordered an investigation into who actually had title to the Island. This “investigation” revealed that the property was actually owned by the Perry family of nearby Phippsburg Maine. Upon learning of their ownership of the island, the Perry family promptly filed an order to evict the “squatters” living there for generations and sold it to the state of Maine for $400. Some local religious leaders did try to purchase the Island from the Perry family in order to give it to the Islanders, but they were rebuffed.

On December 9th 1911 a Doctor on the Governor’s council signed papers that committed the entire population to the Maine State Home for the Feeble Minded (an Insane Asylum) in Pownal Maine. The deadline of July 1, 1912 was given as the final day for the residents to remove themselves from the island voluntarily.

From January through June several residents, mostly children, were committed to the asylum during various encounters with local authorities. Other residents packed up and moved their families onto their fishing boats and started to live a life fully at sea, fearful that should they settle anywhere that they their family would be sent to the asylum too.

On July 1st, 1912 Maine Police landed on the island to remove any remaining inhabitants and have them committed. They found the Island abandoned. In a final act of cruelty, they ordered all remaining structures burned and then exhumed the local graveyard and had the remains re-interred at the Maine State Home for the Feeble Minded. The official reason given for this final act of cruelty was to deter future resettlement of the island.

The island is uninhabited to this day and is now managed as a nature preserve by the Trustees of the Reservation…its accessible only by those with a boat. In 2010 the State of Maine officially apologized to the decedents of the Malaga Islanders, and the Maine State Museum opened an exhibit on the island. A few newspapers ran stories about it but it remains largely unknown in New England today.

As a New Englander, I feel strongly that it is vital that we remember what happened on Malaga Island. What I find most despicable about what happened was how quickly New Englanders forgot about the atrocity that was committed there. Many New Englanders, myself included, are rightly proud of our Abolitionist heritage and scorn the legacy of slavery and racism so prevalent in the rest of America. To be completely clear, we should scorn that legacy and we should honor our abolitionist ancestors who risked their lives fighting against it. That said, by turning a blind eye to our own history of racial atrocities we become the worst kind of hypocrite. We must never again allow ourselves to forget what happened on Malaga Island…and now that you know about it, I must ask you what you plan to do to ensure that we never forget about it again and that nothing remotely like it ever happens again?