Blacks in New England: Few Strive to Maintain Their Cultural Identity : Race relations: The region is 98% white. Some African-Americans say there is no sense of community; others love the area.

Leola Marshall has lived in Maine since the late 1940s, but the Mississippi native still can’t understand blacks living in northern New England, the nation’s whitest region.

Her family drove to Maine in a beat-up car with a bent fender and a smashed headlight to look for work. She arrived only to discover that the black neighborhood in the state capital, Augusta, consisted of a single black family.

Marshall was troubled to find that blacks lacked the sense of community she had grown up with in the South. She adjusted to the winters, but never to the different attitude.

“Black people are not together up here. I don’t know what their minds think. I really don’t understand them,” said Marshall, who lives in Portland--in the southern part of the state--and operates a Southern-style restaurant.

Maintaining black culture is a tough job in a region that is more than 98% white, where the rural areas are resistant to change and where schools aren’t required to teach black history.

Marshall has kept her roots alive at the restaurant over which she presides. The surroundings are humble and Southern, just like her upbringing. The fare consists of plenty of vegetables, corn bread, barbecue, fried chicken, even chitlins.

But her efforts to preserve her culture are rare among other blacks. In many cases, blacks just adapt to their predominantly white surroundings and try to blend in.

“If you’re black in places like Maine, you can lose your identity if you’re not careful,” said Gerald Talbot, who in 1972 became the first black elected to Maine’s Legislature.

Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont have the smallest proportion of minorities in the nation, according to the 1990 Census. Each state is 98% or more white.

“Being in a white state, the education system seems to cater to the majority, which is the white community. Wherever you go, you’re a minority in a white society,” Talbot said.

“Most likely, you will go to school with very few blacks--I’m talking two or three blacks--or no blacks,” he said. “It sets you aside from everybody else. Black history is something that’s not taught to anybody on a regular basis.”

Charles Lumpkin, a black graduate student in Maine who selected civil rights as the topic for his master’s thesis, said that, to his knowledge, no one has published a journal, thesis or book on civil rights in the state.

There have been racial incidents--a millworker repeatedly taunted by co-workers in Maine, students at colleges in Vermont complaining about harassment. But black activists acknowledge that most racism is not so blatant. More often, they must contend with stares and insensitive comments.

Little things also remind blacks that they are a tiny minority. It’s hard to find a copy of Ebony magazine, and bookstores don’t always carry books by black authors about blacks.

Talbot couldn’t find Shahrazad Ali’s controversial book, “A Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman,” at any bookstore in Portland. He picked up his copy in Detroit.

“For children to grow up (in this atmosphere), it’s a problem. Everything they see, practically, is white America,” said Talbot, a former three-term president of the Portland chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

But other blacks dispute that view.

“I don’t need to be around people who are the same color as me to feel comfortable,” said Vanessa Johnson, whose father, New Hampshire state Rep. Lionel Johnson, is past state president of the NAACP.

“I am very grateful to have grown up here,” she said. “I feel that growing up here, I had a better chance to accept people for what they are and not for what color they are.”

Sandra Hicks, current head of the NAACP in New Hampshire, agrees.

“New people sometimes come into the state--they get frustrated because there’s no established black community,” said Hicks, who grew up in Boston’s inner city. “I didn’t come here for the black community. I came here because I like New Hampshire.”

Still, Talbot and other blacks are doing what they can to preserve and foster black culture in the region.

Retired for three months, Talbot is building his collection of black history materials. In his Portland home, he has busts of famous blacks, photos, paintings, books, even a 10-foot slave chain and shackles.

His collection of busts includes depictions of Matt Henson, a member of Adm. Robert Peary’s expedition who planted a U.S. flag on the North Pole; Charles Drew, who persuaded doctors to use plasma for blood transfusions in World War II; and Louis Lattimer, who patented a method for increasing the life span of carbon filaments in light bulbs.

“You can’t go through a day without encountering contributions from black Americans,” Talbot said.

Talbot and his wife are the founders of Black Education & Cultural History Inc., which they operate out of their home. He takes his collection of materials to schools for presentations on black history.

“I’ve gotten to a point where I’ve got so much stuff. It’s so important that these things be preserved and shown. People should be able to see that,” Talbot said.

Churches also have helped preserve and promote black culture.

Blacks in northern New England have several traditional evangelical churches, such as the Green Memorial AME Zion Church, a Portland church with roots dating to 1835.

Rodney Patterson, director of multicultural affairs at the University of Vermont, established the only black church in that state in September, 1988. The congregation consists of about 50 people, most of them black.

Patterson, a Chicago native, said he founded the New Alfa Missionary Baptist Church in Burlington because he saw the need for a church that’s “more traditional to the African-American style of church.”

“My own personal desire is for the culture of African-Americans to be valued in this society, because I feel it’s undervalued,” said Patterson, 32, the church’s pastor.

As for Marshall, the restaurateur, she said things have improved since the days when blacks in Maine could get jobs only as maids, cooks or porters.

“Maine people have changed 100% from when I came here,” she said.

As for living in a predominantly white society, she said: “We can’t outnumber them. But we can raise hell.”