By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
from the Burlington Free Press)
Did you ever wonder how your own ancestors, especially those who were Martin Luther King Jr.’s contemporaries, dealt with issues of race and bias in their own times and places? I have learned some interesting stories about mine.
Vermont, where most of my family is from, abolished slavery in July 1777 in the state’s constitution, but never has had much of a non-white population. Like the rest of the world, it watched the first initial steps of the Civil Rights Movement in the middle years of the last century. In 1948, President Harry Truman ended segregation in the armed services. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, ending separate but equal school segregation. In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, promoting a yearlong bus boycott. And in 1957, MLK was named chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
In late February 1957, LeRoy Williams, the black senior captain of the University of Vermont (UVM) football team, invited his girlfriend Joyce Austin to attend parts of UVM’s popular annual winter festival, commonly known as “Kake Walk.” Williams was one of only about a half dozen blacks attending UVM, but he was well-known and well-liked. He and some friends booked and paid for rooms for their visiting girlfriends at the Rest Haven motel in Burlington. The innkeeper gave keys to the white women. When Joyce arrived later, however, the motel owner denied accommodations to her because she was black.
The community was outraged. Students protested and called for action. The local newspaper denounced the conduct. Vermont’s attorney general opined that such discrimination was against the state’s common law. Joyce and her friends stayed elsewhere. “I must have received over 50 letters from Vermonters welcoming me and my girlfriend into their homes, should I or my family ever need a place to stay,” Williams said later.
At the same time my uncle, David V. O’Brien, had just graduated from UVM, where he had been a student leader and a fraternity brother. He was attending law school out of state in Syracuse, New York. Uncle David had a history of speaking out against racial bias. A few years earlier, while a young marine, he had ended up in the Camp Lejeune brig, and on extended KP duty peeling potatoes, after he protested the mistreatment of a black enlistee. He later was known within his family as most proficient at french fry production.
When he heard about the Rest Haven motel incident, David sent a letter to the Burlington Free Press. The newspaper published it on March 6, 1957. Entitled “Dismayed by Negro Case,” the letter stated:
“Editor:
Having just read of the barring of a Negro girl from a motel in the Burlington area, I take pen in hand to express shock and dismay that such a practice should be allowed in Vermont.
That commercial establishments should be allowed to succumb to the “second class citizens” theory is a fact that demands action by that state office which appropriately handles such matters.
It is an insult to a young lady, and to her escort, who has given four years of exemplary conduct to our state university. The operator of this establishment has by his action caused all good news of Vermont to be sidetracked.
How can Vermont be considered as uniquely independent if practices such as these are allowed to continue?
The University of Vermont has been a classic example of treating persons by quality of mind and not color of skin, and I am sure I speak for others when I say that this motel operator has insulted all colored students who chose UVM because of the lack of the very prejudice just experienced.
We should do all possible to rectify such a violation of God’s moral law.”
Vermont did do all possible. A few months later in 1957, about seven years before a national law was passed, the state legislature enacted a statute prohibiting private establishments that catered to the general public from discriminating on the basis of race. Senator Fred Fayette, a Notre Dame grad and lawyer from the Burlington area, wrote the anti-discrimination bill. A few years earlier Fayette’s brother Jimmy (another ND grad) had married Uncle David’s sister (and my aunt) Virginia O’Brien, who also was the maid of honor at my mother’s wedding.
Joyce Austin and LeRoy Williams were married in 1958, the year after his UVM graduation. LeRoy worked for many years as a dentist in New Jersey. He and Joyce had four children and 10 grandchildren. Uncle David went on to serve in county office in Syracuse, New York, and later was appointed to work as a federal judge in St. Croix, the U.S. Virgin Islands. As a judge, David was known for his fair-mindedness and compassion.
The Williams 1957 motel incident also prompted UVM to reconsider the whole Kake Walk event. The Kake Walk essentially was based on a minstrel show where UVM fraternity members danced in blackface and satin tuxedos, a concept apparently derived from slaves on northern plantations who performed in outrageous ways for their owners with the most comical winning a piece of cake. Some frats, notably the one to which Williams belonged, stopped wearing blackface, and used purple or green paint instead. Within a few years of the Rest Haven motel incident, UVM had completely replaced the Kake Walk minstrel show with a music and film festival.
Nobel laureate South African Bishop Desmond Tutu said, “Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” Author James Baldwin wrote, “The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you can alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change the world.”
The American Civil Rights Movement progressed because of both big steps taken by a variety of people, and even due to “little bits of good” and “millimeter” actions by others, including my own family. I am proud of my family’s very public 1957 stand for equal rights in their own backyard. As MLK himself said, “If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.”
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about his Vermont family roots and growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
