Charlottesville North?

[Upton_O_Goode]

This is all about Nazi and Confederate flags.

I've been asked to write some history of the University of Vermont, and that led me to a compendium put together for the bicentennial back in 1991, edited by my friend Bill Daniels (who died in 2010).

The article that caught my attention was by the writer Jules Older, whom you may know. He has published a lot. He was a 1962 graduate at the University and one of the pioneering Jewish students there. (Raul Hilberg had been hired in 1956, and he and Sam Bogorad in the English Department were, as far as I know, the first two Jewish professors.)

Anyway, Older's article bears the title, "Catholics, Blacks, and Jews." Older came to Vermont from a heavily Jewish portion of North Baltimore in 1958, hoping to broaden his experience of the world. That happened very quickly, as he was soon assaulted by one of Kappa Sigma's finest. Despite the assault, he wanted to pledge a fraternity, but didn't want to be ghettoized in a "Jewish fraternity." He went through Rush Week, and found that Kappa Sigma (the Animal House of its time, as he describes it) was sporting Nazi flags, only just over a decade after the War, and after the University had hired the man who was to become the founder of Holocaust Studies. He persevered, and married one of his fellow students. Before writing the article for the 1991 collection, he went back to Kappa Sigma and found that they are no longer the Animal House. (That honor, he said, had passed to Sigma Nu.) A considerable number of members of Kappa Sigma were in fact Jewish. So, progress of a sort. However, although all the Nazi flags were gone, there were still a couple of Confederate flags there. He suggested to the brothers that they might consider the effect those flags would have on African-American students; not very different from the effect the Nazi flags had on him.

Well, it's been a rocky road, and we still haven't arrived. When I first took up a position at UVM, the major social event of the winter was Kake Walk, a painful exhibition of white students dancing in blackface. It was abolished in 1970, to HOWLS of outrage from the alumni. (You can find YouTube videos of it. Yes, it is artistic, but it is inexcusably patronizing to African-Americans.)

[Statistical Mechanic]

thanks, very interesting, you tie some "family history" together for me in fact

[Jeffk 1970]

Thanks, Upton, very interesting.