 Hello everyone, welcome to the last third Sunday lecture of our 2020 season. Don't worry, we will be back in January 2021 with more interesting and thought-provoking presentations. This has been a very interesting year for us but I'm pleased that we were able to continue bringing you these lectures every month and in a format where you can enjoy them for years to come. We have explored a lot of interesting topics this year. Our lectures explored material culture, artistic methods of exploring history, partisan politics and civil unrest in the years leading up to the American Revolution. We explored stories about marginalized people and scrutinized beloved historical figures. And we emphasized the importance of civic participation and voting through the lens of people who were denied that agency for centuries. We have been able to bring you this series at no charge and there are several businesses that need to be thanked for this. They are Burlington Cars, 802 Cars, One Day in July Financial Advisors and People's United Bank. These businesses are the main reason we were able to continue bringing you these talks in this format. We hope you will continue to support us by making a donation. There is a link in the description box below and your donations will go directly to help us come roaring back next year with great events and great programs. I am very pleased to present this month's speaker, Elise Gayet. Elise is a historian, a writer and an educational consultant. She is a part-time faculty member at the University of Vermont. She has taught history workshops for teachers throughout the United States and in China and South Africa. Her talk is entitled, The Jagged Edges of Progress. And it is based on her book, Discovering Black Vermont, which tells the story of three generations of free African Americans trying to build a life and community in northern Vermont in the years following statehood. She revisits the people from her first book and provides new information on the roles they played in Vermont and also nationwide during the reconstruction period. I now present Elise Gayet. Hello everybody. I'm so happy to be here presenting today. As you can see, I've entitled my talk, The Jagged Edges of Progress. And I will talk about that today. I'm not just talking about my book because I've discovered new things since I published this book, some things before these folks came to Vermont and some things after some of them left Vermont. So this will be about my book largely but also some expanded information. So the subtext for this talk is going to be the Jagged Edges of Progress. I think that our concept of progress as this line is just we just keep getting better all the time is a real problem because we miss there are high points in our history and there are low points. And then there are high points and then there's a pushback sometimes a violent pushback. And I think that what happens in schools is that we teach these high points. And that's all we're teaching it makes it seem like this is progress. But that is not the real progress especially for women and people of color looks more like this line here. So that's the subtext of my talk today. Let me introduce the main characters of the book and they are Hannah Lensman and Prince Peters, who, sorry about that, who settled here in Heinsberg. This is the earliest map that I've ever found of Heinsberg was all wrapped up in a roll at the top of the shelf in the town clerk's office. It was very exciting to find it. So you see here Prince and Samuel Peters. This is where the road goes Lincoln Hill it goes like this and then you see an L Clark who is Lewis Clark, and he is the son of these clerks right here, Schuble Clark and Violet Bassett. So these are the two families the Clark family and the Peters family, which are the main characters in this story. I know now that before Schuble Clark came to Vermont, he came in the 1790s and settled first in Moncton, Vermont. And before he came he had been enslaved by Partridge and Mary Thatcher of New Milford, Connecticut. He wrote in the town history about the births and deaths and marriages of all of what he called servants, but these people were enslaved servants is the New England term for enslaved peoples. And he talks about Jacob and Dinah that arrived in this country in 1749. And it turns out that Jacob and Dinah were the grandparents of Schuble Clark. And so they were enslaved by this family. His family was enslaved by the Partridge Thatcher family for over 30 years. And by the way, Thatcher Brooke and Thatcher Brooke school are named after Partridge Thatcher because he was one of the early proprietors of Waterbury. So let's situate Hinesburg. This is Chittenden County in 1857. This is Hinesburg down here, the square town in the bottom, zooming in a little bit. You could this is the hill that we're talking about Lincoln Hill. When these folks moved here in the 1790s, most of the land on the western side of Hinesburg had been taken. But there was still good arable land over here and that's Lincoln Hill right there. And then you can see Lincoln Hill even closer. So this is 1857 about 2025 years after that really early map that I showed you. And you can see that there are still some Peters here. Prince Peters and Hannah Lensman had both died by 1857. And this is their son Josephus Peters. And this is Charles Waters, who's a son-in-law of Josephus Peters. There's no Lewis Clark anymore. He's gone. And by that Clark is still here with others of her family, but she will has died by now. So one of the big questions for me is why is Lewis gone now, because he had enough money in the 1820s 1830s to buy his own plot of land and have his own farm. And that was the sign that the second generation could afford that. That was the sign that you would stay and that you would become important in the civic life of the community. But here we have Lewis is not here anymore. He's gone. And I know now that he's, he moved to the Northeast Kingdom. So that's an interesting open question about why he didn't stay. Could it have had to do with race? Of course it could have. So let's start with a high point for these folks. They were the revolutionary generation. They were around when the Declaration of Independence that Martin Luther King calls a promissory note to all people. They were around when the Declaration of Independence was written and black soldiers fought in the thousands for the revolution. Some of them fought on the American side. Some of them fought on the British side because they both promised that they would end slavery if they won the revolution. So these soldiers had to make a choice and at least one of the people who moved to the hill Prince Peters did fight in the revolution in a Massachusetts line. I know that because here's his revolutionary pension. It doesn't mean that the other folks didn't fight in the revolution. You had to be indigent to get a pension so not having a pension doesn't not mean you didn't fight in the war. But Prince Peters did and it was great that I have this pension of his because it talks about his children and their ages. So I know all their names now I know approximately when they were born. I know that he had been a farmer and that he was in poor health in 1820 when he applied for a pension, which he did receive and he, he got his pension for the rest of his life. However, as we know slavery was not ended in the country. So, as his quote says those who served so nobly and sacrificed their time and strength in the common cause were obliged to return to their homes, unrewarded. So Prince Peters was one of those. The Constitution was written, leaving blacks out of the body politics, actually making them three fifths of a human being. So that slavery was still in full swing and would be for many, many, many decades after the revolution. And this John Lewis was talking about Charles bulls who was a free will Baptist preacher who started a free will Baptist church in Huntington. So right near these, all of these folks. They thought about why they came here there wasn't even a road to the lands that they chose to farm on at the time that they came. And I think perhaps they were just looking for isolation. They didn't want to be surveilled by whites as blacks always had been. I think maybe they were looking for isolation and they found this, this wonderful place in Heinsberg that had very good soil and a lot of sunlight for farming. So this high point of the revolution and their heightened hopes for freedom for all people did turn out. So there was this backlash after the war, and in order to let our founding fathers off the hook of hypocrisy. This new theory rose and it was called scientific racism. This was where so called scientists were measuring arm lengths and measuring around people's heads and measuring the distance from your forehead to your nose and they had decided that people of color were inferior by blood. Before the revolution, the main theory was that yes, people of color were inferior but they were inferior culturally and that could be taught people could be taught a different culture. But after the war, they really started saying no, this is really in everybody's DNA. And of course the white man is right in the middle. This was the model of a civilized human being at this time in the 1820s and 30s. So by the time the second generation was coming along on Lincoln Hill in Heinsberg, this scientific racism was really starting to take over people's minds. But for some reason there seemed to be a slower transition on the hill to this full blown scientific racism. Let me go back. And we can see that even though these folks may have been searching for isolation, I really found a friendly farming community. And here I found an account book from Nathaniel Dunham, who had a general store in Heinsberg, and I could see what they were buying and selling. The interesting thing to me was that I found Matilda Dorsey in 1827 going to the store specifically to buy the butter of Miss Clark and the butter of William Langley. Of course William Langley wasn't making the butter, his wife or his children were making the butter. And one of the Clark children, maybe Phoebe, maybe Harriet, maybe all of them were making butter. And Matilda Dorsey apparently knew who was making the really good butter. So we know just from this one little line in an account book that these folks were making a quality product. They were participating in the economy, and other people knew they had a quality product and were coming to the store to buy them. And of course these scenes, you know, a black woman making butter we don't think of as part of Vermont's history, but it certainly is. And then we also have in the Heinsberg Church records, we have both Schuble Clark and Violet Clark requesting to become a member of the Baptist Church in Heinsberg in 1815 and 1816. Not only did they join the church, but Schuble Clark became a leader in the church. He was often appointed to be on committees to go visit people who were wayward for some reason, had been sinning and needed to repent their ways and come back into the church. So he was often on committees going to visit people, asking them to mend their ways and come back into the church. Some of them did, some of them didn't. He was on one example of a woman who refused to listen to Schuble Clark because he was black. But most people seem to pay attention and listen when he came to chastise them. And that's unusual having a black man chastise white people and people paying attention to it. So there was a biracial church. There was also a biracial school. Sorry, I keep doing that. There was a biracial school. Phoebe Clark married William, or Elmira Clark married William Langley in the 1820s, and they had children. And they lived on the Huntington side of the border. And some of them lived on the Huntington side and some of them laymen over into Huntington and apparently that's where Elmira and William set up their household and sent their children to the school there. And it was a biracial school. I have no idea if they had trouble. There's nothing about that and the records. I do show that as time went on, you can see here that the Langley children are mixed right in with all the other children who are going to school there. But as time went on in these records, I found that the Langley scholars, as all the students recall, the Langley scholars were separated out down at the bottom for some reason. I don't know why because the records don't describe that, but something was going on here that they felt that they needed to separate out the black children from the white children who were going to the school. You know, and it could be that this scientific racism, you know, the whole that whole mindset is really taking a hold up here in this army community. Well, it was interesting in the Baptist Church records that at one point, here's Lewis Clark in this list. I'll talk about this list in a second. But Lewis Clark and his wife Ruth Clark were members of the church. And at one point in the records, they talked about a committee going to see them, not to ask them to mend their ways but a committee going to see them to eject them from the church immediately. There was no committee coming back and forth and trying to talk them into mending their ways. What the committee said was that Lewis and Ruth were lodging together, which they thought was against the gospel. Now, I don't know exactly what that means. It could mean that they were lodging together out of wedlock. I don't think that's the case. Or it could mean that Lewis was black and Ruth was white. Maybe they thought that was against the gospel. I'm not sure about that. But they were thrown out immediately. Now, a few years later, during a depression, a committee goes back to Lewis and Ruth, and they say, Oh, we're sorry, we made a mistake, we want you to come back into the church. And Lewis came back right away. It took Ruth five years before she came back to the church, but Lewis went back right away. And here's one clue as to why they may have asked him to come back during this difficult financial time. Here's a list of the people in the church with the most money. And here's Lewis Clark down there, right, mixed in with some of the wealthiest people in the community. So I think maybe in this case, class might have trumped race. And they asked him back into the church and they came back in and they were members in good standing after that. Another really interesting thing going on up here in the hill was the way they use the courts. And this is a dower for Violet Clark at her husband had died. Her son Lewis Clark was her executor. And this was years after Schuble had died, she still hadn't gotten her dower her thirds, what widows always got from the estate she still hadn't gotten them. So this document here shows that she went to the courts, and she, and she asked them to direct her executor to give her her property. And the judge wrote to Lewis Clark, and told them that they, he needed to give Violet all of these things on the list. It's interesting to see 100 sap buckets. So we know they had a sugar bush up there, and they were making a lot of maple sugar, not necessarily syrup but maple sugar. And you can see all the plow the farm instruments. She was making cheese up there. She had looms and wheels, so she was making cloth, probably linen. She had a half a cook stove. It doesn't mean she had to have to stove it means she's sharing it with somebody. So anytime that you see these fractions in the in on documents like this she's sharing it with somebody and it turns out she's living with her son Charles at this point so she's sharing it with him. So she used the courts to her advantage. Her son-in-law, William Langley, who you remember married Elmira Clark, also used the courts. I loved this Superior Court document here, because it goes back to, even though it's from 1846 it goes back to 1835 to talk about the relationship between William Langley and John Norton. And at that time, John Norton had loaned William Langley a number of cows and sheep, and he could keep them for 10 years. And at the end of 10 years, what he had to do was give back the original number of the cows and sheeps, any issue from those animals Langley could keep. And it says here that this is customary months farmers. You see what was going on up there in this community, this biracial community, and the friendly neighborly relations and how they're helping each other out was really wonderful. But then 10 years later, William Langley needs to take Amanda Norton, John Norton's son, John Norton's daughter, had to take her to court, because she was trying to take his land away from him. You owe me a lot of money for all these cows. You owe me a lot of money for some land that you had mortgaged with my father, and that was not true. The deal was that William Langley got a mortgage for 50 acres in Huntington. And as soon as he got the money together to pay him, he would pay him back with a little bit of interest, and the land would still be his. Amanda Norton tried to defraud him. This is a time of really lowering expectations. She may have thought that she could defraud him. She may have thought that he wouldn't know how to use the courts, but he took her to court, and he won this court case. And the interesting thing about this little house that they lived in was that this has been documented as being on the underground railroad. So this is a story of blacks helping blacks, which we don't hear a lot about. But you know, I never found any, never found any graves of these people. And that's because at the top of the hill anyway, where the Clarks lived. There was a cemetery intact cemetery until the 1990s. This is within people's memories they remember it being an intact cemetery, but it was destroyed in the 1990s so this picture of the cemetery which is not recognizable today as a varying ground tells us more about now that it does about then. But this is one reason I've not been able to find any graves of these folks and then the other farming family at the bottom of the hill the Peters. I don't find any of their graves either until at least a third generation. So I don't I don't know where they're very unfortunately. And these are some of the Peters men Josephus Peters sons. They no longer have their farm. They do have some land still, but they're not subsistence farmers they need to work for white families. And this is a picture from the old McEwen farm he was a very wealthy farmer in the area, and they Josephus and his sons and other descendants traditionally came and worked for this family. So now, so at least half of this farming community in Heinsberg, no longer farming, but now working for whites. So the, their, their fortunes continue to go down. Unfortunately, during this time. And then we had into another area of heightened expectations. And this is the Civil War, and blacks looked at the Civil War as the second revolution. They said now this time, we are going to end slavery. So they looked at this as their second revolution. And there were many blacks who fought they were for four men from the hill in Heinsberg went to fight and they all joined with the Massachusetts 54th. As soon as they could, they had wanted to join as soon as the war started, but they were not allowed to entail the Emancipation Proclamation. But it's interesting that you see here this is the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in South Carolina. New Year's Day 1863. And there are black soldiers, but all these black soldiers here there were black soldiers who received the colors that day. And then you can see all these people up on the dais and very important people up there. So there were people already in the field fighting from South Carolina from Kansas and from Louisiana. It wasn't exactly legal, but they were doing it. Now one of the men from Heinsberg who went to fight ended up down in South Carolina a lot. The Massachusetts 54 was there a lot. And he saw this he saw the South Carolina first which later became the South Carolina 33rd. He saw them he found out about them. He said these are the first ones these were the first blacks fighting for our freedom. And I want to join that regiment. So he asked to be transferred and he was transferred to the South Carolina 33rd. This is the way they were dressed when they first were organized and they they were the colors of France the French Revolution. They really hated those red pants because it made them more visible to the enemy so they didn't last they didn't use those very long. However, unfortunately, there was still a lot of discrimination even within these, you know, black regiments that were totally black regiments. This is from somebody else from the hell. His name is Aaron Freeman he married a woman from Lincoln Hill, and he moved there, and he went with with all the Langley men who went to fight. And he's writing back to one of the Robinsons at Rokeby and Ferrisburg because he used to work there, and he felt comfortable enough writing back to complain about their treatment there. And he talks here he says, we, we, we drill all day and they make them that have got boots. They go out in their bare feet in the thistle and drill. Then they said on their horses and laugh at us. That ain't right. So they were always writing back letters loud and Langley in 1864 from Brattleboro says that there was almost a mutiny among the soldiers that he was associated with down there, because the white soldiers got the $75 and the black soldiers got nothing. Actually, the officers told them well, because they came from a different state that we're going to get their, their money, you know, when they got down to New York or when they got down south. But loud and Langley kept telling them no it's not true. He told all his compatriots that's not true. You know, this is a real problem. He thought they would have been superhuman. If they had superhuman had we sustained all of the disappointment that the truth conveyed without being greatly chagrined and disposed to mutiny. But they didn't have their arms yet. So, so they did go down south and they found out once they got down south that that what the officers had told them were alive and they were not going to be paid what the white soldiers were played were paid. They continued for most of the war toward the end this this did get rectified. And so the people who were fighting in the Civil War left the war with heightened hopes again that the federal government was going to support them in their quest for fully quality. We very quickly reach another low point. And that is presidential reconstruction. And this course Lincoln was assassinated. Andrew Johnson took over he was from Tennessee. He was for union, but he was a white supremacist. And while Congress was in recess. He did things like he pardoned all the Confederates, who would pledge their loyalty to the union. They had been land set aside and given to the freemen, so that they could start their lives with some land and become independent farmers, and they had been farming this land for several years. He took it all away from them gave it back to the traders who had started the war at secession. And then those folks were out with with nothing. And he allowed these southern states to write black codes that kept people in neo slavery. So this was a real low point this presidential reconstruction, but pretty soon Congress comes back into session. When they come back into session, they refuse to see anybody from the south, and they until they all rewrite their state constitutions in order to ensure liberty and freedom and equality for everybody black or white. So all of these people that Johnson had had, you know, promise, could come back into Congress, they were not allowed to they, they had to go home and they had to rewrite their constitutions. Now at this time, there were black people who who could vote, and there were black people who were crew and some power. And if you look down here. This is the district of Buford in South Carolina. And these are the people who are representing Buford. And you see right here there's LS Langley. That's loud and chubble Langley from Huntington. He and his wife and their children had settled down in Buford, South Carolina by 1866. And he was already in a crew and some power, and he goes to the Constitutional Convention, which writes a wonderful Constitution. It's still the Constitution of South Carolina today is very progressive. And I love this because this is from a newspaper at the time. And they were talking about how loud and Langley had said that he didn't want reporters from a certain newspaper to come in because he has been burlesqueing the other biracial constitutional conventions in the south. I'm very happy to let them in if they would act like gentlemen but if not, he doesn't want, he didn't want them coming in. He talked a lot. He talked a lot at the Constitutional Convention. You know what he was interested in he was especially interested in education, and he was, he was especially interested in protecting the rights of the laboring man, because he says, that's their only property was their labor, and he didn't want to just protect land he wanted to protect people's labor and getting paid for that labor. There came a very powerful man down there in reconstruction politics. He was here you can see his name, all over in the deeds. When I first went down to South Carolina and open these deeds books. I couldn't believe it was page after page after page with loud and Langley. And it turns out he had been appointed the auditor of Buford County. He was collecting taxes, taxes were needed in order to reconstruct the south. They had to pay people now to work. They couldn't just get the gains of people who had been kidnapped and enslaved to do it for nothing they had to pay people, which is why they had to pay taxes. And, and the white supremacists were just incensed by this that they would actually have to pay taxes to help people of color was unheard of to them, and they really became enraged and they, and they fought all of these people at every turn. He became the town auditor he became a school commissioner. At one point he became the superintendent of schools in Buford, the first superintendent of any color in down in South Carolina. And he became an election official in 1870 which made him a target. You can see what happened because he was made a target. He was actually accused of stuffing the ballot box along with a couple of other men and arrested. He was in a trial which lasted several weeks. It was a hung jury they couldn't they said we think somebody did something wrong but we don't know exactly who did it. And the judge said well everybody has had their chance to tell their side of the story and all everyone should go free so everybody went free they all went home. The Langley's were very excited to have loud and back home, but then very shortly they decided to have another trial. It only lasted three days. The men were not allowed to testify on their own behalf. The jurors were mostly ex confederates. Those that were not ex confederates were black men who were working for them and really would have needed to really would have needed to do what the what the ex confederates wanted them to do, or they would lose their jobs. And the only reason I found out anything about this was that I discovered that he was pardoned by us grant in 1872. So he spent two years in prison and then he was pardoned and then he went back to South Carolina. I want to just remind everybody, eight years, there were biracial. Congresses. There were biracial administrations throughout the south. They raised taxes. And they dealt with some of these horrible things that from the war I mean the infrastructure had just spent and almost totally destroyed down there. The rivers and harbors were all clogged, could hardly get get down roads, you know half the livestock was gone farming machinery was destroyed. And these are things that these, these biracial politicians dealt with, and they were dealing with them well, but it really enraged white supremacists, mainly because it belied their idea of white supremacy. Black folks could really reconstruct the south. It was that they were just beside themselves they didn't know what to do. And one of what this is. And one of loudens colleagues Thomas Miller talked about all the things that they had done together they rebuilt school houses. They established charitable institutions. They, they modernized the penitentiary system, they providing all sorts of education for all kinds of people who had never been allowed to have education before. They really had reconstructed the state, but, and they had done it fighting the white supremacists the entire time the white supremacists were out murdering people day and night to try to get the blacks to stop voting. To try to kick them all out of office. So by 1877. This is, you know, or this is a new low point now reconstruction had been a high point they were really high hopes that the federal government would continue supporting the free people. And, but with the election of haze in 1877. The federal government made a deal with the local white people down in the south that if they would stop. If they would, they, they were going to go and march into Washington and they were going to take over they weren't going to allow haze to become the president, even though he had one but one electoral vote. Hey said no don't do that what can I give you in return and what they wanted in return was local control. They wanted all the military taken out of the south and put all of the free people back into the hands of the people who had enslaved them. And in South Carolina, it's governor Hampton general Hampton. He was a Confederate general who rode in to Columbia after the steel had been made with 500 red shirts on horses and threw out all the legally elected black people and other and white Republicans from office. So the Langley's lost everything he lost his job. He lost a lot of his property because they couldn't pay the taxes. He lost his health and very soon after he was buried. And here's his grade in the National Tempt Cemetery in South Carolina. He was a sergeant major that was the highest that a black person could go in that time period. And so he was, he was buried there. And there's still clinging to some hope in the north that that whatever good had come out of reconstruction might stay and might actually spread. This is Williams that so George Williams from Heinsberg had moved to Burlington by this time. He became a partner in a barber shop with with Abiel Anthony. George Williams son, also George Williams, and he was put through the University of Vermont and the University of Vermont Medical School by his father's support from this barber shop. And he was the first black man to graduate from the University of Vermont Medical School in 1909. So in 1909, there was still some hope in people's hearts. However, you may recall that in 1915, there was a movie called the birth of a nation and the birth of a nation. The movie itself and our president at the time Woodrow Wilson, a claimed that the Ku Klux Klan was a wonderful and noble group that had just come. They needed to protect the south. And the Ku Klux Klan had really stopped a lot of their activities by this time, but it was Woodrow Wilson and it was the birth of a nation that that was the impetus for reforming this group. And you can see here these are horrible photographs, but these photographs were made into postcards. And it was a, it was a little subset of the postcard industry. Pictures of lynchings and tortures of black men, women and children made into postcards and sent around the country. So this is a culture of cruelty that is still a part of our country today. So, right after the end of reconstruction, when this violence in our country just kept going up and up and up, while violence in other developed nations were going down and down and down. And this, this extra violence has continued to this day in our country. And we need to face this, we need to face this history if we're ever going to fix the system that we find ourselves in. So many of these people, starting about 1917, 1915, I have here until the 1960s. It caused the Great Migration, people were trying to get away from that barbarity in the south. So, thousands and thousands of blacks, moving out of the south, sometimes at the risk of their own lives, because if they were caught with a suitcase by the people who ran these, the plantations, they could be lynched, their children could be lynched, because they wanted to have the maximum amount of terror to keep people from leaving because what would they do if all their cheap labor left. But this is Jane in Love and Langley's daughter, Ida. She was born down in South Carolina and raised there and she moved to Ohio and met Harry Proctor and married him. There were others in the family who left and went to Washington DC and lived there. And there were some who stayed down in South Carolina. They had to stay through these really horrible times, really dangerous times in the south. Who stirries do we memorialize? Here's Wade Hampton, General Hampton, who rode into the Colombian through Loud and Langley out of work as long as a lot of other people and he's on the State House lawn on a horse. We memorialize the culture of cruelty that he represents. And who stirries do we burn? This is a photograph of Lyman Peters, descendant of Prince Peters, the Revolutionary War veteran. And when, when the last Peters died on Lincoln Hill and this was in the 1990s, somebody went into the house, one of the families, somebody from the family went into the house and was burning all of the photographs because they didn't want to have any evidence around that they had been suspended from black people. So you can see here that this, this photograph has been, you know, cut off and, you know, because it was burning was actually saved from the fire. You know, and it's very sad that the people who are proud and this proud of their heritage in this country are people like, you know, Wade Hampton, instead of people like the Peters and Prince Peters who had fought in the Revolutionary War. It's a very sad state of affairs. But here was some more heightened hopes and this was in 2010 we put up this historical marker to Lincoln Hill, since early black settlers there. And there were a lot of descendants here, they were brown, they were black, they were white, there was a wonderful picture of America. They were all there together to celebrate their family and their families history on this hill. And this was the time of heightened hopes. This was Barack Obama was the president at the time. Some people were even saying, well, now we're post racial, but remember the jagged edges to progress. You know, so in 2010, when I wrote this book. This is the way I ended it. I didn't know what was going to happen. But this is the way I ended it I said we have to be careful, we have to remember we can't rest. We can never rest on our laurels. We have to continue our struggles against racist city ideologies. Always, because there will be a violent backlash disillusionment inevitably follows each moment of heightened hopes and expectations by people of color and their allies. This was the morning in 2010. Now I'm not sure where we are. This was pre recorded before the election. So I don't at this moment sitting here, I don't know what happened. You all know what happens now. We need to remember no matter what happened no matter where we are in this jagged edges whether we're going back up or whether you know we're going down deeper. You know, we had no control over what the world was like when we were born. But we do have control over the way we leave it. And we really need to face this history and we need to face it with courage, if we are going to be able to escape from it because if we don't know our history. James Baldwin said we're just going to be trapped in it and we'll never be able to escape. So I think it's very important that we face our history. We know our history and we go clear eyed into the future and try to make the world a better place. Thank you very much. Thank you for attending our third Sunday lecture series. Next we will be featuring David Colley on the old east end of Burlington. And of course, as always, if you'd like to make a donation to the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum to support our programming, please go to the link in the description box below. Thank you very much and we'll see you next year.