This commentary is by Stephen C. Terry of Middlebury, a former managing editor of the Rutland Herald (1977-85) and a Statehouse reporter (1965-69).
Racism punched Vermonters hard in the face with the shotgun night-rider attack by three whites on the home of a Black minister in Irasburg in the early hours of July 19, 1968.
The shock and impact of that racial attack is still being felt and debated more than a half-century later with the publication of a new book about the notorious Irasburg Affair, as well as two other state police scandals during the 1970s.
The book, “Night-Rider Legacy, Weaponizing Race in the Irasburg Affair of 1968,” published by White River Press with the Center for Research on Vermont at UVM, is a blockbuster read when race issues in Vermont can no longer be ignored. The book will be available in early December.
Gary Shattuck of Shrewsbury is a former Vermont State Police commander, lawyer, former assistant Vermont district attorney, and now author. The author spent four years of meticulous research for his important book with almost 1,000 footnotes. He brings back to life the events surrounding the Irasburg Affair, which shattered Vermont’s quiet image by making it national news for its unusual racial attack in a lily-white state.
The lessons from that series of events, as well as the 1979 Router Bit Affair, and of the dirty cop, Paul Lawrence, who in the 1970s planted drugs on people and then arrested them, showcased a decade-long misbehavior by the Vermont State Police.
For this reason, this book is an important recounting of Vermont history, especially now, when police-community issues are frequently considered breaking news in the nation.
For me, Shattuck’s book was a return to one of the most reported Vermont news events of 1968, already a very tumultuous year with the Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King murders, anguish over the Vietnam War, a spirited GOP gubernatorial primary, and efforts in our state to foster more racial understanding between young rural whites and urban Blacks.
During the Irasburg Affair, I was a Statehouse reporter for the Rutland Herald and the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and one of the news people covering these events.
For many in Vermont, these events and the role of the Vermont State Police during the 1960s and 1970s have faded into the mists of history. Yet, this history is critically important for Vermonters to have a perspective with which to judge the work today of Vermont’s police forces, state and local.
Shattuck has done a brilliant job of recreating that time. He writes, bottom line, that his book is “an account of the unintended consequences resulting from the careless use of divisive, racially charged language lodged against law enforcement agencies when virtually no evidence of racism existed.”
Wow! Shattuck’s conclusion was a surprise to me as I remained convinced, more than a half a century later, that racial attitudes tainted the work of the Vermont State Police in investigating the Irasburg case. In fact, a three-member commission investigating the Irasburg case, headed by the late U.S. District Judge Ernest W. Gibson Jr., found that the state police went from prosecuting the shotgun attack to persecuting the Black minister.
While the state police members were investigating the shotgun attack, they observed that the married Black minister was engaged in sexual relations with his white house guest. This resulted in the two being charged with the crime of adultery, which added a whole new salacious dimension to the story.
The Router Bit Affair involved state police members in the St. Johnsbury area getting free seconds of router bits for their personal use, which they later misappropriated. In 1979, I directed coverage of the impact of the Router Bit scandal as managing editor of the Rutland Herald. The tragic result was that Vermont State Police Cpl. Howard Gary Gould, distraught over the scandal, took his life on July 30, 1979, behind the Vermont Statehouse, and left a note that is included in the book.
I agree that the Vermont State Police did little to support Gould’s widow and family after the tragic event. At the same time, Vermont’s media fell short in its reporting, as well. We were all focused on the scandal and not much on the human tragedy and its impact on the Gould family. As the Herald’s managing editor, I should have done more to focus our reporters on that aspect of the story.
In the book’s epilogue, Shattuck sets forth documentation of the many efforts by the Vermont State Police to create new leadership from within. He convincingly argues that the old culture of “Fortress Redstone,” the former location of the police headquarters, has now evolved into a culture of accountability and transparency. Prior to these events, the state police were a law unto themselves, as the scandals of the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated.
Disclosure: Shattuck, after several interviews, asked if I would write a preface for his book. I agreed, and even though I disagreed with his central conclusion, he bravely included it. I believe it gives this important book even more credibility.
