Editor’s note: This commentary is by Ross Connelly, a retired journalist who owned The Hardwick Gazette from 1986-2017. He is past president of both the New England Press Association and the Vermont Press Association.
[I] am saddened and sickened that racist harassment and threats led Bennington Rep. Kiah Morris to announce in late August that she was withdrawing from her re-election bid to serve a third term in the Vermont House of Representatives. Barely weeks before her announcement, she had won the primary election to have her name on the ballot in November to compete for a seat in the two-member district.
In an interview on Vermont Public Radio, after announcing her decision, Rep. Morris said since 2016 she has suffered vandalism, a home invasion, online threats, seeing swastikas painted on trees in a woods near her home, and more.
She said her 7-year-old son saw one of the threats and understood what it meant.
That, she said, is “something that’s unacceptable to have happen for anyone, let alone someone who chooses to step up and serve. It’s not acceptable for any Vermonter.”
I am a resident of Vermont. Racism and bigotry are an affront to me. I know this area of the state is not immune from such putrid and repugnant actions and attitudes. Within the past two to three years, a Black Lives Matter sign was stolen from a local resident’s yard, and a “Rainbow” flag, representing inclusion for LGBTQ people, was stolen from a flagpole on the campus of a local college. In addition, swastikas and racial epithets were spray painted on private farm buildings. An “Immigrants Welcome” banner, hung off a railing on a public footbridge over the Lamoille River as it runs through Hardwick, was slashed and shredded.
Such incidents are not new. Targeting people of color with name calling and ostracizing has happened in local elementary and high schools, stretching back over decades.
I also know many people locally and statewide believe racism has no place here.
Speaking in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1959, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said, “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”
Dr. King’s words ring true today.
We, the citizens of area towns and elsewhere around the state, are the ones who must speak up and speak out that what happened to Rep. Morris is unacceptable to each one of us. We must speak and act if we truly want to expunge racism and bigotry from Vermont.
