Re: [Marxism] White only towns

[Jon Flanders <jonflanders@xxxxxxxxx>]

I was thumbing through for the first time in a while a coffee table book
I got for Christmas a few years ago documenting my home state of
Vermont's 20th century history.

One of the articles from the 1920's featured a two page panoramic
photograph of  an assemblage of the Klu Klux Klan, in Montpelier, my
home town(actually I grew up in East Montpelier.) Evidently it was quite
socially correct for some of the better element in those days.

It seems that the Klan in Vermont had quite a renaissance in the
twenties. Since there were virtually no black people in the state, and
still are very few, the object of the Klan's ire focused on other
groups, mainly immigrant Italian Catholics. I suspect this was all part
of the Palmer Raid backlash in the post WW1 period. Barre, which is
right next door to Montpelier, is a major granite quarrying center, and
was a magnet for Italian stone cutters immigrating from Michelangelo's
Carrara quarries. Many were socialists and anarchists.

An incident mentioned in the book involved a Klan raid on a Catholic
church in Burlington, where they suspected an arms cache was being kept
in waiting for a papal order for Catholic Insurrection.

It appears that racism and stupidity have no limits, even in the verdant
hills of Vermont.

Jon Flanders




On Thu, 2005-10-27 at 18:30 -0700, James Zarichny wrote:
>     When I was a kid,restrictive covenant clauses were
> enforced by the local police.  My parentsʼ knowledge
> of English was so limited that they usually had me
> read documents  and translate.  In 1934,  my parents
> bought a house north of Pierson Road in Flint  As a
> condition for selling, the land contract specified 
> that the house would not be resold to  Persians,
> Greeks, Negroes, or some other groups. This
> restrictive covenant clause was strictly enforced  by
> the police, even in the poorest areas.  For example in
> most of the area where we lived, there was no sewage
> system.  People had outdoor toilets.  It was not until
> 1937-38 that Rooseveltʼs WPA put in sewers in all of
> the city.   It was only some years later, after
> several Supreme Court justices had died and been
> replaced by New Dealers that the U.S. Supreme Court
> ruled that restrictive covenant clauses could not be
> enforced by law enforcement agencies.
>      Jim Zarichny..
> 
> 
> 
>               
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