Vermonters in communities around the state gathered this weekend to demonstrate against racial injustice, as protests sparked by the death of George Floyd nationwide stretch into their third week.
In Bennington, some 100 people took a moment of silence in the middle of a downtown street. In Waterbury, 500 people protested racial injustice by marching through town. In Stowe, people joined in a car parade — a form of protest that has become common as the Covid-19 pandemic continues. The latest events come after people gathered by the hundreds and thousands across Vermont last weekend, and officials and communities started considering policy changes to address systemic racism.
State lawmakers this week worked on measures targeting racial inequities in law enforcement, including banning chokeholds, mandating the use of body cameras, and expanding collection of traffic stop race data, which in past years has shown sharp disparities in search rates between white people and people of color.
Residents of Burlington and Montpelier this week called for cuts to municipal police department budgets, echoing national calls to defund police. Chittenden County’s top prosecutor announced she would review all pending cases against black defendants for racial disparities. In Bennington, where a black legislator stepped down from her seat in 2018 partially because of racial harassment, a petition is calling for the police chief and town manager to resign.
VTDigger will cover anti-racism rallies across the state this weekend. Planned events include:
- Brattleboro: Friday, 5 p.m., vigil on the common
- Montpelier: Saturday, 10 a.m., painting Black Lives Matter on State Street
- Randolph: Saturday, 12 p.m., starting on Maple Street
- Colchester: Saturday, 12 p.m., near Dollar General on Prim Road
- Bennington: Sunday, 3 p.m., in front of the police department
- Stowe: Sunday, 1:45 p.m.-3 p.m., (driving) Stowe Elementary School
- Burlington: Sunday, 10:30 a.m. Juneteenth gathering at City Hall
- Waterbury: Sunday, 4 p.m.-5:30 p.m., Rusty Parker Park
In the face of hostility, 200 rally in Bennington to protest police racism
(June 14, 8:49 p.m.)
BENNINGTON—Nearly 200 protesters lined South Street on Sunday to show solidarity with the global Black Lives Matter movement, and to protest alleged systemic racism within the Bennington Police Department.
Organizers Eveona Williams and Carson Gordon, both Bennington High School students, led the group in chants, shouting “no justice, no peace,” and “I can’t breathe” into their megaphones.
At times, chants became pointed, as protesters shouted “hey, hey, ho, ho, these racist cops have got to go.”
The event comes alongside the circulation of a statewide petition, written by advocacy group Rights and Democracy, that calls for the resignation of Bennington Police Chief Paul Doucette and Town Manager Stu Hurd, both accused of perpetuating a culture of racial injustice.
Williams, 16, moved to Bennington six years ago. She said she wanted to organize the event to raise awareness so that other kids don’t have to feel the judgement she felt when she arrived.
“I’ve experienced a lot of racism, especially in this town,” she said. “I didn’t know what racism was until I came here.”
For 8 minutes and 46 seconds of silence, more than 100 protesters abandoned their posts on the sidewalk and flooded South Street., taking a knee to honor George Floyd who was killed when a police officer kneeled on his neck during an arrest in Minnesota.
That silence was broken when Carlos Dobbins, who has lived in Bennington for 20 years, began to shout at police officers walking by. “Motherfucker pulled a gun out on me for nothing,” he said, referring to one of the police officers. Another protester responded, “Did that really happen?”
Then, Mia Schultz, an organizer of the RAD petition, called back, “We believe black voices, don’t we?”
Worried about potential conflict, Williams said she tried to think of every possible scenario while pulling the protest together.
“It was days of figuring out what we were going to do, talking about what could happen and the people that could come here,” she said. “We had to take safety training just in case. We talked about people running us over.”
Several anti-protesters appeared at the rally. A car whose path was blocked by the kneeling protesters honked continuously for nearly 3 minutes.
Black Lives Matter supporters surrounded two anti-protesters, one of whom held a “Blue Lives Matter” sign, and all attempted to raise their signage highest while facing press cameras.
Max Misch, a white nationalist who was investigated for racial harassment targeting former Vermont state Rep. Kiah Morris, paced in front of the crowd while waving a sign that read “Burn Loot Murder,” with the B, L and M bolded.
VTDigger reported that in 2018, Misch wrote to Morris on social media, “Every time you attend a political rally at the Four Corners (intersection) or another local venue and I’m aware of the event, I will troll the hell out of you and the other subversives there. Maybe I’ll bring a friend or three with me too.”
Schultz commended the students for organizing the event in the face of potential hostility.
“I’m proud of our youth, to be able to put this together,” she said. “This is really scary. It’s a really hard thing to do.”
In spite of the confrontation, the protest was worthwhile, Gordon said.
“Today was an example of how, when people want to come out and show hate,” he said, “love will always surpass them.”
— Emma Cotton
500 hundred march in Waterbury
(June 14, 8:36 p.m.)
WATERBURY — About 500 demonstrators filled Dusty Parker Memorial Park Sunday afternoon to protest against racism and police brutality, especially against people of color. The demonstration echoed similar actions across the state and the nation in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis after an officer knelt on his neck.
The crowd listened to speakers as they maintained social distance while holding signs supporting Black Lives Matter and calling for the defunding of the police. Julio Desmont, an artist who is an immigrant from Haiti, said he didn’t think there was any racism in Vermont until he experienced racial profiling at the hands of police.
“I felt I had to get involved once I started to be targeted,” Desmont said. “What I want to tell everybody is don’t wait until you become a victim… We aren’t going to wait until we become a victim. That’s why we are all here today.”
The demonstrators observed 8 minutes and 46 seconds of silence, the amount of time a police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck, killing him. During the silence, a woman yelled from a passing car, “White lives matter. White lives matter!”
A short time later, protest organizer Maroni Minter addressed the crowd to say: “What just happened a few minutes ago is exactly why we are here. If you are here and still believe there is no racism or white supremacists here in Waterbury and in Vermont, then you shouldn’t be here.”
After a series of speakers filed up to the microphone to share their experiences with racism in Vermont, the demonstrators marched through downtown Waterbury with many passing drivers tooting their horns and raising fists out of car windows in support.
Correction: An earlier version of this item referred imprecisely to what a woman in a passing car yelled out and how organizer Maroni Minter responded to her statement.
— Glenn Russell
Racial justice and political leaders celebrate Juneteenth in Burlington
(June 14, 6:20 p.m.)
BURLINGTON — Dozens of community members, along with some the state’s most prominent anti-racism activists and politicians, gathered on Church Street Sunday morning for a Juneteenth celebration hosted by Chittenden County Senate candidate Kesha Ram.
While organizers had talked about limiting the number of people in attendance to 25, in keeping with state social distancing guidelines, the crowd ultimately tripled that. Some 75 people gathered around City Hall, almost all wearing masks and staying six feet apart.
Among the crowd were Tabitha Moore, a leader of the NAACP in Vermont; Harmony Edosomwan, a UVM student and former head of NoNames for Justice; Attorney General TJ Donovan, and all four candidates for lieutenant governor: Molly Gray, Brenda Siegel, Sen. Tim Ashe and Sen. Debbie Ingram
Community leader Joy Dixon opened the event with a brief history of Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating June 19, 1865, the day when news arrived to the last remaining enslaved peoples in Galveston, Texas, that they had been freed — two and a half years after Abraham Lincoln had delivered the Emancipation Proclamation.
Many of the event’s speakers stressed the ways that Vermont’s status as a progressive, northern state has allowed white Vermonters to think that they are removed from the legacy of slavery, and the racism inherent in American life.
“Burlington is not innocent of this racial violence,” said Kyle Dodson, executive director of the Greater Burlington YMCA. “Burlington loves to say, ‘that’s true, but not for us.’ We think we are so progressive as to have it not exist here, and that will completely stymie us from the effort to move forward.”
Kiah Morris, movement politics director at Rights and Democracy Vermont, said if the state’s political leaders had to decide today whether to abolish slavery, it wouldn’t be a simple decision.
She said she believed Vermont political leaders would “struggle deeply” if faced with that choice now because of the problems it might create for the state’s people in power.
Morris said the state’s struggle over whether to move its prisoners to Mississippi is evidence of that struggle, as is the resistance to an increased minimum wage, giving undocumented people voting rights, and the current fight over expanding Vermont’s vote-by-mail system.
“These are questions that people are wrestling with? In what reality other than a surreal one,” Morris said. “There is no reason why we have to be afraid of the kind of the progressive reforms that are necessary, because the power system is absolutely able to shift gears as is needed to to support its systems of support, so we must dismantle them with equal energy, courage and temerity.”
— Ellie French
200+ vehicles parade through Stowe and Morrisville
(June 14, 6:10 p.m.)
STOWE — As more than 200 vehicles drove Sunday afternoon through town, some people inside the cars cheered, others honked horns, and a few rang cowbells to make sure they were heard.
“Silence is Violence,” read the sign on one of the vehicles taking part in the car parade to support racial justice.
Members of REAL: Racial Equity Alliance of Lamoille and the Social Justice League helped to organize the vehicle parade Sunday in Stowe. Last week, the groups paraded through Morrisville.
Organizers say they will continue to hold similar events throughout June in other Lamoille County towns in response to Minneapolis police killing George Floyd, an unarmed black man, three weeks ago.
A person in one of the vehicles taking part in the car parade Sunday in Stowe held a sign with the name Rayshard Brooks written on it. Brooks, a black man, was shot and killed by a white police officer in Atlanta on Friday evening, leading to the termination of that officer and the resignation of that city’s police chief.
In Stowe, before the parade set off Sunday afternoon, vehicles filled the parking lots of the town’s elementary schools, a nearby recreation area, and an arena.
Britney Spaulding, who is black, lives in Morrisville, and works in Stowe, helped put together the event in Morrisville last Sunday and was among the first to arrive in Stowe this Sunday
“I think that every town has its own culture and heartbeat,” she said. “In Stowe, in particular, we’ve seen with their businesses they’ve expressed a lot of interest in the Black Lives Matter movement. They’ve been posting a lot of stuff on their social media.”
Spaulding added, “We saw that there was a cry to have something out here in this community.”
Many of the attendees Sunday talked about how racism is not confined to one part of the state. Several spoke of an incident much closer to home when, in 2018, organizers of a summer camp in Stowe reported that campers were the target of racial slurs. That led Gov. Phil Scott to write a letter of apology to camp participants.
Daneil Whyte of Morrisville took part in the vehicle parade Sunday in Stowe with the Black Lives Matters sign on her car.
“As a black woman, in America and in Vermont, there is a lot of racism that happens,” she said. “For me, it’s my right to speak up against it, I can’t be quiet about it.”
Several of those taking part in the vehicle parade Sunday through Stowe continued on to Morrisville, where some students at Peoples Academy organized an event that drew more than 100 people to the center of town, holding signs to spread the message of racial justice.
At one point, people lining the street got down on one knee, where they remained for 8 minutes in 46 seconds — the length of time that a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee on George Floyd’s neck.
“Black Lives Matter,” said Addie Baranyay, one of the student organizers of the Morrisville event. “For the people who say, ‘all lives matter,’ not all lives matter until black lives matter.”
She added, “We wanted to make sure everybody knew that.”
— Alan J. Keays
Hundreds paint ‘Black Lives Matter’ on State Street in Montpelier
(June 13, 2:53 p.m.)
More than 200 people came together in front of the Vermont Statehouse on Saturday morning to help paint “Black Lives Matter” on State Street.
Read the full story here.
— Sawyer Loftus
Brattleboro silent vigil draws several hundred Friday
(Saturday, June 13, 9:17 a.m.)
Brattleboro has hosted two large Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the past two weeks, but area resident Stephanie Pardy had reason for organizing a third on Friday.
“My kids wanted to go, but I was uncomfortable with them being in large crowds,” the mother of four said as she adjusted her Covid-19 mask. “I thought, ‘How can I make this work?’”
That’s why Pardy and other volunteers measured out patches of grass at least 6 feet apart on the Brattleboro Common so several hundred people could sit or kneel silently for 8 minutes and 46 seconds — the amount of time black Minnesota resident George Floyd was pinned down by a white police officer before he died, sparking protests nationwide.
“This is a peaceful vigil,” local broadcaster Peter “Fish” Case told the crowd before noting his white skin. “If you look like me, it might be a better time to listen than to speak.”
The event drew several members of the Brattleboro Police Department, which is inviting residents to the Common Wednesday for a community forum at 5:30 p.m.
“I, like many of you, am angered and saddened over the events surrounding the death of George Floyd,” Brattleboro Police Chief Michael Fitzgerald has written in a [Facebook post]. “Law enforcement officers represent their community. In order for any law enforcement agency to be successful, it is critical for the community to trust their police officers and the police officers to trust their community.”
— Kevin O’Connor