WINDSOR, Vt. (AP) - A Vermont town is considering renaming a street that honors a prominent former resident, who also illegally owned a slave.
The local governing board of Windsor, Vermont, is scheduled Tuesday to discuss whether to rename Jacob Street, named after lawyer and politician Stephen Jacob.
Jacob purchased and owned a Black slave, Dinah Mason, who he later abandoned when she became ill, the Valley News reported. The town of Windsor sued Jacob in 1802, alleging he was responsible for her care.
The case against Jacob eventually made it to Vermont’s Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor. At the time of the ruling, Jacob was a member of the court, though he had recused himself from hearing the appeal.
Vermont’s constitution was written in Windsor in 1777 and had outlawed slavery for adults.
Historical records show Jacob was among multiple prominent Vermont residents who bought and held slaves illegally, Harvey Amani Whitfield, professor of history at the University of Vermont, told the Vermont Digger in 2016.
A nonprofit dedicated to historic preservation in Windsor put up a marker outside of Jacob’s historic home honoring Mason on Juneteenth this year.
In other developments about how the national reckoning with racial injustice is affecting Vermont:
MURAL TO BE REMOVED
The painter of a mural depicting African Americans and abolitionists involved in the Underground Railroad has 90 days to remove it before the Vermont Law School paints over it, according to the school.
The school’s board and students have said the work is offensive and does not meet the school’s commitment to social justice.
The board made the decision Friday to comply with a federal law, after initially saying it would paint over the mural, the Valley News reported. The Visual Artists Rights Act gives certain moral rights to artists who create works of “recognized stature.” In this case, the school is offering the artist the option to remove the work instead allowing it to be destroyed.
As far back as 2013, students at the school said the mural in the student center portrays Black people in stereotypical and exaggerated ways, the newspaper reported.
“The Underground Railroad, Vermont and the Fugitive Slave,” painted by Sam Kerson and installed in 1993, includes eights scenes on two 8-by-24-foot panels. It depicts Africans being forced into slavery and sold at auction, images of John Brown, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a blond Vermont woman trying to block the view of a bounty hunter looking for fugitives trying to escape slavery on the Underground Railroad.
“We call on our friends to remind the law school that art is culture and art is history and that those who have the privilege of having art also have an obligation to preserve those works for another generation,” Kerson told the newspaper. He said the murals should be protected.
“If the artist chooses not to remove the mural, the mural will be painted over or otherwise removed,” Nicole Ravlin told the newspaper in an email Friday. “In the meantime, the mural is being temporarily covered.”
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