![]() ![]() The study, however, unlike Seguino’s more comprehensive earlier one, assessed only Vermont State Police stops and not those by all our many local departments, sheriffs, and deputies. Progress has been made according to a 2018 study by the Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity. The study also found that 56% of black drivers searched were found with contraband, compared to 67 % of white drivers searched. Stephanie Seguino, black drivers were four times more likely than white drivers to be stopped and searched by Vermont police. In a 2017 study of police-stops conducted by UVM Prof. To date, little that made Misch’s racist intrusion in Morris’s life entirely legal, has changed in Vermont despite outcries. More recently, Vermonters remember the Kiah Morris case in which Vermont’s lone black female legislator was harassed by a Bennington white supremacist, Max Misch, to the point where, fearing for her safety, she resigned her seat. Hence the name KakeWalk which persisted in Vermont in my childhood and at UVM until 1969. The grand prize for the highest steppers was a “plantation cake.” As a middle-school student I remember sneaking into the auditorium and watching seniors audition for the spectacle. The “owners,” king and queen of KakeWalk, sat in large chairs and watched as students dressed in black-face and tuxedoes – their slaves – high-stepped towards them in pairs with their arms pitched up and way back. Growing up in the fifties and going to Morrisville’s People’s Academy, our spring event was “KakeWalk,” a parody of a racist and humiliating amusement staged by slaves for their owners. Vermont’s own Calvin Coolidge embraced the popular science when in 1924 he declared, “America must be kept American,” and as president, he supported The Immigration and Restriction Act of 1924. It was also the well-documented subtext for excluding people of color. UVM formally apologized for its leadership position in the racist “science” and promotion of eugenics which went well beyond the intellectually challenged. The 1931, Vermont’s “Eugenics Law” targeted “idiots,” “imbeciles,” and “feeble minded” and “insane” persons, permitting the state to castrate or sterilize people deemed as such. The story was the basis of Howard Frank Mosher’s 1989 A Stranger in the Kingdom. But the interracial couple was fined $125 for adultery and they left the state soon after the incident. Conley was charged with breach of the peace and was fined $500. David Lee Johnson, his partner and her daughters. ![]() Just three months after Martin Luther King’s assassination, a Glover man, Larry Conley, fired shots into the living room of The Rev. In 1968, when I was 23, I followed the Irasburg incident. The hugely successful film is often credited with the genesis of the Ku Klux Klan. Griffith’s silent film Birth of a Nation played in theaters across the country, including Morrisville’s Bijou Theater. And when the sheets came off, we all were their customers, employees, and friends … so silly.” In 1916, D.W. Morrisville didn’t have any black people or Jews, so they rode around the homes of Quebecois, Italian, and Irish – most of us, in fact. “It was so silly, really,” she would chuckle, “those grown men riding around town dressed in sheets. My French-Canadian grandmother, Elise Couture – the moral beacon in our family for 101 years – recalled for us the Klan’s activities in her hometown of Morrisville. But as we congratulate ourselves on our professed belief in racial equality and our historical abolitionist efforts, honesty calls us to remember the dark underbelly of racism and economic privilege that persists even today in Vermont. In Vermont, we like to imagine ourselves a welcoming community, and for much of our history we have been and are. ![]() 116 between Lantman’s Market and NRG Systems in peaceful protest both of the murder of George Floyd and the deep and residual culture of racism in America. Last week, some 200 Hinesburg young people, families, and other citizens walked Rte. Watching the murder of George Floyd has called on me to explore my own white privilege and intersectionality perspective. Like many Vermonters, I’ve been watching with pain and empathy the protests unfolding in countless cities and towns across the country. ![]()
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