CRAFTSBURY — A group of residents want the town to form a task force to combat racism and inequity after a trio toting a Confederate flag in a truck disrupted an antiracism rally in early June.
“You guys have privilege,” Farley Brown, chair of the town planning commission, said of Craftsbury Selectboard members. “You should use that platform to make a statement or pass a resolution that this type of racism — someone driving around with a Confederate flag — will not be tolerated.”
The incident at the June 10 rally — chronicled by the Hardwick Gazette, Seven Days and Vermont Public Radio — is one reason why some residents of the Orleans County town are calling on their local government to act.
Like their counterparts around the state and nation, demonstrators had gathered that day to condemn racism in law enforcement after the May 25 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by police officers.
As members of the 200-person crowd began making speeches, Jay Wright of Craftsbury arrived in a pickup truck with his teenage son and a friend in the back.
The teens waved two flags — one Confederate, the other reading “Don’t Tread on Me” — as Wright drove past protesters. According to Seven Days and the Hardwick Gazette, at least two of the three were armed.
Twelve days later, the official blog for Sterling College in town characterized the counterprotesters as seeking “to intimidate those peacefully assembled by flying the battle flag of the Confederacy.”
Wright could not be reached Tuesday for comment via phone or social media.
The new effort in Craftsbury is a collaboration among several citizen groups looking for the same sort of change.
Two of those groups appeared at a June 16 Selectboard meeting, each with its own proposals.
Brown was one of four people who asked board members to make a statement denouncing racism, according to meeting minutes.
Afterward, representatives of more than 25 people asked to be put on the July 7 meeting agenda to discuss banning the Confederate flag in Craftsbury.
Opal Savoy, who grew up in town, belonged to that second group.
“This has been a problem in Craftsbury for a while, but we’ve never really talked about it,” she saidt.
Savoy was there when the truck pulled up. She left, rather than try to confront the occupants like a few other demonstrators did.
“I was terrified,” said Savoy, who is transgender. She’d felt uncomfortable in town before because of how people view her gender, she said, but the June 10 confrontation was the first time she felt unsafe.
Frustrated by the event, Savoy said she decided to help organize people to ask officials to ban the Confederate flag on town property, and potentially elsewhere.
But that initiative was tabled when she and others decided to collaborate with Brown and the group asking for a Selectboard statement.
“It seems like trying to focus on really, really setting up something institutional is the way to go about it,” Savoy said. “It’s not that we’re not going to do it — I just think that we’re all trying to be more forward thinking than just trying to do some one-off actionable items and calling it a day.”
Savoy wants the town to form a task force that would facilitate discussions about racism and discrimination, research incidents and present findings to the Selectboard.
The activists have been joined by a third group that worked on a Black Lives Matter mural on a roadway in town. According to Vermont State Police, the mural was recently vandalized by someone in a dark pickup truck who burned tire marks across the words.
In the same report, troopers also said a sign for the Craftsbury Farmers Market had been defaced with the words “KILL THE PREZ” in spray paint.
Organizers are set to propose the task force idea to officials at the board’s July 7 meeting.
At the June 16 meeting, board member Susan Houston wondered if a committee for racial justice could become part of the town’s Neighbor to Neighbor group, a resource network for residents focusing primarily on the Covid-19 crisis.
The racial justice activists aren’t keen on that.
“The idea of having a subgroup of that group of very active and very busy residents does not make sense to a bunch of us,” Brown said.
Houston, in an interview, said that after her initial suggestion, she came to believe the same. And she supports bringing together a town-appointed committee to specifically address racism.
“I think that is definitely the best way forward,” Houston said. “In my opinion, town-appointed committees tend to reflect many parts of the community pretty well, so that seems to be a very equitable way to move forward with this particular issue.”
The developments in Craftsbury come after several local instances in recent years of discrimination against people of color and LGBTQ people and animosity toward the Black Lives Matter movement.
In 2015, a Black Lives Matter sign near the entrance of Sterling College was stolen. Around Christmas that year, a resident who had put up a Black Lives Matter sign at his apartment found a bucket nearby containing the bloodied body of a dead black cat.
In June 2016, people egged a building at the college flying a rainbow flag after the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando that killed 49 people.
Later that summer, according to the college president, a Sterling student of color was walking by the side of the road when passengers of a car threw a beer can at him and shouted racist and homophobic slurs.
Brown said that after the confrontation at the rally this month, she heard from a person of color in town who feared for their safety. The person was afraid for their white friends, too, because of the friends’ association with a person of color.
Savoy summed up the state of Craftsbury as she sees it: “It’s not perfect, and it’s not horrible. But there’s a lot of work that could be done.”
