The KKK in Portland
KKK Field Day, 1926. Members of the Ku Klux Klan from various Maine communities—men, women, and children—gathered in Portland for a field day on August 28, 1926. The Portland Expo building is to the right rear. The Klan was active in Maine in the 1920s as a secret fraternal society that sought to influence politics and promote its ideas of nativism and Americanism, which included opposition to Roman Catholics, Jews, Black people, and immigrants. Over 10,000 people attended a Klan initiation ceremony in August 1923 in Portland.
Many Mainers reacted to the Great Migration with fear and hatred. Place names throughout the state like Nigger Hill, Nigger Island and Nigger Brook Lake made those feelings clear. This fear and hatred became nationally known when then-Governor Frederick W. Plaisted ordered the ethnic cleansing of the Black and mixed-race population of Maine’s Malaga Island in 1911.
Knowing this, it should be no surprise that at its peak in 1925 the Ku Klux Klan had 150,141 members in Maine – more than 1/5 of the state’s population at the time. The history of Maine’s involvement in the KKK goes largely unmentioned because of a lack of violence compared to that of other states. This comparative lack of violence, however, is due to the KKK’s stunning popularity in Maine and the fact that the three times the hate group attempted violence in the towns of Biddeford, Greenville and Fairfield klansmen were swiftly defeated by local violent resistance.
The Club House at 509 Forest Avenue in Oakdale, Portland, was owned by Joseph R. Rollins et al in 1924. The property was subsequently owned by Loyal Realty Company. Listed as KKK Clubhouse.
A common misconception of the KKK is that its membership was poor and uneducated. This is not the case, as klansmen were commonly middle class and often community leaders. DeForest Perkins, for example, was a property developer in Portland, Maine’s largest city. Perkins was also the secretary of the Portland Chamber of Commerce, Superintendent of Portland Public Schools and the Grand Dragon of Maine’s KKK.
As a middle-class organization, Maine’s KKK was highly influential throughout the state’s politics. The hate group not only helped to elect Owen Brewster to the Maine governorship, but also helped to install the City Manager System, a white supremacist form of municipal government in Portland.
The Ku Klux Klan impacted Maine politics during 1923 when over 7,000 of their number rallied to change city government structure from having an elected mayor to hiring a city manager.
The Klan had a huge headquarters complex on Forest Avenue. The Klan's Maine director, F. Eugene "Doc" Farnsworth, spoke against Catholics, Jews, and immigrants.
While Maine’s KKK fell apart as an organization in the late 1920s, its members remained in the state and its influence was not undone. Portland still operates under the same white supremacist form of government even now, keeping the city segregated with Black poverty more than doubling the national rate.
— Samuel James
Additional Resources
99 Years Podcast - a Black exploration of the deliberate creation of the whitest state in the nation
Banned Histories of Race - Samuel James’ Substack
This research was compiled as part of The Walk to Unsettle Portland, which took place in Portland on June 22, 2024. For more information about this walk, click here.
For more research related to this area, click on the tags below. To download a hi-res version of the posters below for educational use, please contact where@atlanticblackbox.com.
This walk was a collaboration with The Third Place, Maine Audubon, and Atlantic Black Box.