Send Rachel to the Democratic Convention in Chicago

Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross is a ninth-generation Mainer who has dedicated her career to public service and social justice. She is the first black woman to serve as Speaker of the Maine House.

In addition to serving as the City of Portland’s Director of Equal Opportunity and Multicultural Affairs for more than two decades, she led the NAACP in Maine and founded several nonprofit organizations, including Maine Black Community Development, Maine Freedom Trails and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Fellows. She chaired the Maine State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights as well as the African American Collection of Maine, housed at the University of Southern Maine.

Speaker Talbot Ross is currently serving her fourth term in the Maine House, representing the Portland neighborhoods of Parkside, Bayside, East Bayside, Oakdale and the University of Southern Maine campus.

As a lawmaker, Speaker Talbot Ross has worked extensively on justice reform and has shaped critical conversations about equity for all Mainers. She sponsored successful legislation to create Maine’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous and Tribal Populations (which she now co-chairs), and also secured passage of landmark bills to include racial impact analysis in the legislative process and expand tribal legal authority over domestic violence against Native Americans.

Speaker Talbot Ross is the recipient of the University of New England’s Deborah Morton Award for exceptional civic leadership and the 2020 Gerda Haas Award for Excellence in Holocaust and Human Rights Education and Leadership. She was also named the 2020 Woman of the Year by Emerge Maine and received the 2021 Waynflete Klingenstein Alumni Award.