Each week Bob is joined by Dan Gediman, the Executive Director of This I Believe, Inc. to discuss one of the original essays from the 1950s radio series. This week’s featured essay is by writer Will Thomas. He was born in Kansas City and worked as a newspaper reporter, editor and wrote pulp fiction to earn extra money. Fed up with everyday racial bigotry, Thomas decided to move his family as far away from Jim Crow laws as he could. After considering Haiti, Thomas eventually settled in Vermont with his wife and three children. His book, “The Seeking,” details the family’s integration into the all-white community of Westford. Click here to read a transcript and to hear the audio of his “This I Believe” essay. Bob also speaks with Anne Smith, the eldest child of Will Thomas about her father’s essay. She was just four years old when the family moved to northern Vermont.
The only two African Americans I knew growing up in Vermont in the 1940s and 50s were black men married to white women in our small town in South Central Vermont. One was an artist and one a musician–both good friends of my parents.
In the 60s, my husband (also a Vermonter) and I lived in New Jersey during the Civil Rights movement and decided to adopt a black child in response to our concern about overpopulation and our heartbreak over the assassination of Dr. King. I think it was because we grew up in the relatively relatively discrimination-free environment of Vermont that we saw this as a logical response to the crisis in our country.
We brought our brown baby home on election day of 1968 in the hope that our pink-skinned birth children (pre-schoolers) wouldn’t notice the difference. And they didn’t at first. They noticed his curly hair before they noticed his skin color. In a way, the election of Barack Obama 40 years later was the fulfillment of our dreams, naive as they were at the time.