Updated February 12, 2019
When “Meet the Press” needed a guest to counter Alabama governor George Wallace’s segregationist views in 1964, the NBC show called on a progressive leader from Vermont. The late governor Phil Hoff delivered, supporting the new Civil Rights Act “while projecting Vermont’s self-image as a racially enlightened society,” according to the 2011 biography Philip Hoff: How Red Turned Blue in the Green Mountain State.
Yet the governor also appeared more than once before thousands of people gathered at the University of Vermont to watch a popular annual blackface show called “A-Walkin-’Fo-De-Kake,” or Kake Walk. The event was so significant — and accepted — that local and state elected officials handed out trophies and cake to the fraternity brothers who performed best.
The 1963 Kake Walk program listed Hoff, lieutenant governor Ralph Foote, Burlington mayor Robert Bing and UVM president John Fey among the dignitaries scheduled to present awards.
Today, many Americans’ mouths are agape at revelations in Virginia, where the Democratic governor and attorney general both admitted this month to having darkened their faces as young men to portray African Americans. Their admissions followed news stories about Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook page, which includes a photo of two beer-clutching men, one in a Ku Klux Klan hood and another in blackface. Northam denied being in the photo, but admitted he did blacken his face when he dressed as Michael Jackson for a dance competition.
The incidents behind the political crisis in Virginia pale in comparison with the blackface tradition at UVM. And though it’s been publicized, and the university library has made Kake Walk materials readily available online, it’s not always remembered quite accurately.
“There was something called ‘cakewalk’ at u of Vermont in the 50’s which involves black face,” former governor Howard Dean tweeted last Thursday. “It was outlawed by the University in the late 50,s [sic] or early sixties because it was seen to be racist.”
Dean, who did not attend UVM, was mistaken on the details. Kake Walk did not end until 1969 — a year after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and president Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act into law.
For 80 years, the Kake Walk winter carnival was the heart of the university’s social scene — a winter homecoming of sorts, complete with the crowning of a king and queen. It culminated in pairs of students in blackface performing an exaggerated strutting dance before a cheering audience to the tune of a song called “Cotton Babes.” The best dancers won trophies and multitiered cakes.
“The Kake Walk was an institution at UVM,” one alum, a fraternity brother, recalled in 2016 in the Vermont Cynic student newspaper. “It was legendary.”
The show, and the term itself, had roots in slavery. Before the Civil War, plantation owners organized slave competitions for entertainment and awarded cake to the best dancers. The cakewalk was later incorporated into Jim Crow-era minstrel shows. The blackface performances became wildly popular across the U.S. and reinforced racist perceptions of African Americans.
White Vermonters’ geographic distance from the South did not serve to enlighten them on race, UVM sociology professor James Loewen wrote in 1991 in the first academic essay on the Kake Walk. If anything, the minstrel entertainment made a deeper impression.
“In Vermont, where few blacks existed to correct this impression, the stereotype provided the bulk of white ‘knowledge’ about African Americans,” Loewen wrote. He traced UVM’s Kake Walk to a series of “nigger shows” put on by students in the late 1880s. By 1897, the event had been formalized and dubbed “Kulled Koon’s Kake Walk.”
The inclusion of three Ks in its alliterative name “was no accident,” Loewen wrote.
Fraternities organized the Kake Walk, but the school sanctioned it and Burlington embraced it. The Friday of Kake Walk became a campus holiday, and the event itself grew into a fundraiser. The final performance, in 1969, cost the equivalent of $250,000 in 2016 dollars, the Cynic reported. Local businesses cashed in on the weekend’s crowds. Newspaper editorial boards mostly celebrated it.
“For some students who were there, alums, that’s how they identified with the institution,” said Pat Brown, a retired campus official who has given presentations on the history of social justice and diversity at UVM.
In 1950, the NAACP wrote a letter to UVM’s president protesting the use of blackface, according to Loewen. In 1955, the Cynic, long a booster of the event, called for eliminating blackface and kinky wigs. The paper’s position changed that year after staff interviewed all six black students enrolled at the time. Each of them objected or said the Kake Walk made them uncomfortable.
Walkers were ordered to switch to light green, then dark green makeup in the 1960s. But it wasn’t until the fall of 1969 that an increasingly activist student body was able to halt the event. Black Vermonters, including physiology professor Larry McCrorey and student Linda Patterson, helped lead the charge.
“[A]s late as 1975-76, my first year at the university, I was asked to speak with fraternities that were still trying to bring it back,” Loewen tweeted as the Virginia blackface scandal unfolded this month.
Decades later, the Kake Walk is largely forgotten, and UVM is better known for campus activism in defense of diversity. Student protesters, led by a group called NoNames for Justice, occupied campus buildings last year to demand that UVM do more to eliminate racism. They succeeded in persuading the university to remove the name of eugenicist Guy W. Bailey from what is now the Howe Library.
“That kind of hard work is an example of trying to honestly grapple with history and the past and determine how we want to move forward,” said Beverly Colston, director of UVM’s Mosaic Center for Students of Color.
Nonwhite students now make up about 12 percent of UVM’s undergraduate enrollment. A more diverse campus may be one reason the university is more actively engaged in pursuing racial justice today, Colston said.
In 2010, Robin Katz, then a UVM librarian, organized a course during which students helped curate a digital collection of artifacts and records related to the Kake Walk. The photos, newspaper articles, posters and documents are now accessible on the library’s website. The collection was also used as part of a critical retrospective piece the Cynic published in 2016 that grappled with the racist tradition. The piece won a national award.
Some UVM classes incorporate the material into the curriculum, special collections librarian Prudence Doherty said. Novelist and ’13 UVM grad Simeon Marsalis believes every student should be instructed on the history of the Kake Walk.
“I would like to see it taught,” he said. “Certainly, the community needs to heal, and in order to heal, it needs to have a conversation.”
The Kake Walk figures prominently in Marsalis’ 2017 debut novel, As Lie Is to Grin, about a black UVM student who learns about the school’s former tradition. The novel parallels Marsalis’ own experience: He only heard of the Kake Walk from a roommate during their senior year.
The book, he said, explores what representations of black identity in contemporary culture might have in common with blackface.
“Have we just reproduced the same cultural expression?” he asked. “Can you actually interact with black culture if you’re always interacting with it at its face?”
The Kake Walk still “occupies a controversial position” in UVM’s memory, Katz wrote in an article about her 2010 course. The defunct tradition represents “for some, a hallowed legacy of creativity, school spirit and leadership,” Katz wrote, “and for others, overt racism.”
UVM recently removed Kake Walk committee plaques from the Howe Library entrance. Yet some alums still speak of their participation with fondness. Last fall, for instance, one alumna empathized with former NBC host Megyn Kelly after she was axed over an on-air comment in which she questioned whether blackface Halloween costumes were racist.
“Megyn, I feel so upset at the treatment you are getting from the do gooders,” the alum wrote on the public Facebook wall for Megyn Kelly TODAY. “I graduated from UVM (Vermont) and participated proudly in Kake Walk. This BS going on hurts people like you and me.”
Unlike some other blackface events, the Kake Walk did not have repercussions for people, including politicians, who took part or attended. The event happened in front of crowds of thousands who packed Patrick Gymnasium and cheered in approval.
“It seems like it would be hard to pull out one individual,” librarian Doherty said. “It was a collective bad decision for years.”
Correction, February 14, 2019: An earlier version of this story misquoted Simeon Marsalis. The quote has been fixed to read: “Have we just reproduced the same cultural expression?”
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Ok, and now please write an article chronicling student activism and the student led diversity movements over the generations at UVM. For instance Kake walk went down with noise, multiple Diversity universities, and Apartheid certainly did not go unnoticed. UVM students and community have consistently taken notice of institutional racism, and have forced an addressing, with and with out measurable results.
I was 15 when I first heard about it in 1967 from my racist stepfather. Although I never saw the show I thought it was a very stupid idea and he thought it was great! I wonder how many others are around that still think it was great but don’t want to say so……
Slide #10 looks like former Governor Phil Hoff awarding a trophy to two blackface students. Phil Hoff had an admirable record promoting civil rights, so I don’t think anyone could accuse him of being a racist. But, it just goes to show how even people of good will could get entangled in a culture of insensitivity.
UVM students up to the 70s were predominantly conservative or apolitical. Activism from the early 19th century was largely aimed at faculty or other students, or fighting the efforts to force students to form a militia and drill….students were highly political. Kakewalk was taken over by the Greeks in the late 40s and turned into a money-making machine through the 50s. In 1950 the NAACP formally asked UVM to discontinue the annual event. Letters to the Cynic show students felt that “UVM was the last bastion protecting negro heritage in the country”. Activism….small handful of out of state, mostly Jewish students push for the end of KW/blackface and in return there is a rise in anti-antisemitism on campus, the FBI investigated. Activism…..a handful of UVM students picketed Church Street Woolworths, but most students did not. When most UVM students picked up the energy of the civil rights movement, they did so for selfish reasons…to stage a sit in to protest paternalism on campus. They appropriated their vehicle of protest from the Civil Rights Movement. The Gov. of the state at the time asked why any students were concerned with the Civil Rights Movement since “there are a handful of Negroes in Vermont”. Activism-mid-60s UVM Students with those from St. Mike’s staged a pro-war march to support Vietnam. Anti-war activist students amounted to a very small group in the beginning…bravely protesting on a campus dominated by pro-war, conservatives Greeks. UVM student body leaned more liberal in their social protests towards the late 70s. Before that, not so much…..mainly concerned with panty-raids, sports and traditions like KW.
It’s almost humorous the way people are appalled at discovering overtly racist behavior that’s been going on in our country for centuries and has hardly been a secret.
I would be shocked if white people living in the south years ago didn’t behave like racist idiots. Many white people behave like racist idiots today! In too many cases proudly flying the confederate flag and terrorizing black people.
Instead of being horrified and shaming racist behavior 30 years ago, can we please support everyone, even former racists, fighting against racist behavior and promoting civil rights in present-day America?
I agree, Penelope. How long ago was it that South Burlington was the Rebels?
Why are Burlington whites continuing the defense of the Marketplace mural which erases 12,000 years of Abenaki civilization and contains a list of “notables” of which 92 out of 93 are white. The mural is our Robert E Lee statue
Perhaps Suresh Garimella, if appointed UVM President, will succeed where others have failed in facilitating, meaningful “teachable moments” surrounding race issues versus reverse intolerance and ignorant student protest, i.e., students blocking Main St., stopping emergency vehicles, shouting UVM president is a “punk.” Recent prosecution of a student over a racial issue was a missed opportunity to learn, heal, understand and grow. Note, every effort was made to encourage UVM to approach that matter as a learning opportunity, and officials were warned it would not end well in court. Officials bowed to student pressure and NOTHING was gained. After one court hearing I attempted to meaningfully engage students in dialogue. They hissed at me, slapping down an opportunity to learn anything about the process unfolding. This was the lowest point of handling that case – closed minds blinded by their own thirst for blood. Changing names of libraries, hanging alumni for their past racial transgressions, unfounded prosecutions, and reckless protests are not the answer. Unless and until people come together to listen quickly, speak slowly, learn jointly, the dream of diversity will remain an illusion.
“The mural is our Robert E Lee statue.”
The mural is arguably a silly, frivolous piece of wall painting, but it is NOT anything remotely equivalent to a Robert E. Lee statue.
Please find something real to obsess about.
Hey assumptions, you’re confusing artwork with narrative. The issue is the issue I raise. Are the Abenaki erased or not? Are the 92 of 93 “notables” white or not.? Is it an offensive public memorial like the Lee statue or not? Why is obsessing against racism a bad thing?
What are you doing to fight racism in Vt besides trolling web sites to condemn those that are?
Try logic and discourse rather than always posting ad hominem attacks against people you disagree with……………..so boring!
“Try logic and discourse rather than always posting ad hominem attacks against people you disagree with……………..so boring!”
First, there is nothing particularly logical about your posts about the mural. You just repeat over and over and over and over that it’s “racist,” because you believe it to be, and that anyone who disagrees with you about it is racist because you say so.
Second, YOU are complaining about ad hominem attacks because I question your analogy to a Robert E. Lee statue, and call out your obsession with the mural? How about you repeatedly calling the mayor, the council — anyone you disagree with “racists” and “capitalists”? Calling someone a racist (merely because they don’t share your particular obsession with the mural) is NOT an ad hominem attack?
Please.
And, the “Minstrel Show” in Tunbridge Vermont continued until 1991…
In my years at UVM–1963 to 1967–the student body was nearly 100 percent white, and Kake Walk was so prominent that very few people of color would even think of applying. A tiny handful of us protested the event in 1963–the same small group protesting the Vietnam war and the ROTC requirement. The numbers of protesters vastly increased by 1967, but we faced massive resistance from wealthy alumni donors who threatened to cut off funds. In 1969, UVM finally did the right thing, but took a huge financial hit as a result.
Mr. Assumptions…..you still haven’t shared with us what you’re doing to fight racism. We know you hate people who are but, since it’s Black History Month, please tell us what you’re doing now (or ever) to eradicate racism?
Sorry, Mr. Petrarca, racism is certainly a disgrace, and you’re obviously a person of good intentions, but none of us owe you, a white, self-appointed race warrior in little Burling-town, who spraypaints walls and calls allies racists, any explanations on what they’ve done to fight racism. I doubt you’ve changed a single racist mind or prevented a single racist act by spraypainting a frivolous and rarely-noticed mural.