Notes from the Book Tour
From ‘A Book, an Idea and a Goat,’ Andru Volinsky’s weekly newsletter on Substack is primarily devoted to writing about the national movement for fair school funding and other means of effecting social change. Here’s the link: https://substack.com/@andruvolinsky?utm_source=profile-page
By ANDRU VOLINSKY
I hate to even raise the topic of racism. I know how painful it is to be wrongly accused.
The topic is fraught and I am a white guy. Is it even my place? I’ve decided to raise the topic here because my book touches on it. The question of whether NH is racist also comes up at about one third of my talks. Finally, divisive concepts laws, book bannings and the organized chaos aimed at school boards leads school districts to self-censor and avoid addressing this question in the appropriate atmosphere of a classroom. It’s not my responsibility to provide the answer but shame on me if I don’t raise the question when it stares me in the face.
Starting with a personal story.
Hillsborough, NH was on my route as a public defender when we first moved here in 1982. I mostly defended serious felonies in the cities of Nashua and Manchester but our staff split up the rural courts and Hillsborough was my draw. The court was in the basement of the fire station. They covered the pool table with a cloth when court was in session. No one bothered to cover the dime store painting of the Coon-Town-Fire-Department that hung prominently on the back wall of the courtroom. The painting featured caricatures of Black people on a fire truck. This, in a house of justice.
I suppose not many knew of this insult.
Although it was a much bigger deal, few also know about the Noyes Academy in Canaan, NH. From Wiki: “The Noyes Academy was a racially integrated school, which also admitted women, founded by New England abolitionists in 1835 in Canaan, New Hampshire, near Dartmouth College, whose then-abolitionist president, Nathan Lord, was the only seated New England college president willing to admit Black students to his college.
The school was unpopular with many local residents who opposed having Blacks in the town. After some months, several hundred white men of Canaan and neighboring towns demolished the academy. They replaced it with Canaan Union Academy, restricted to whites.”
Another more recent example….
In 2003, I represented the NH ACLU against the city of Manchester whose police were “consensually” photographing people they stopped in the city but who were not arrested. We sought the disclosure of the photos because we suspected the effort was designed to intimidate people of color who “consensually” encountered uniformed officers with badges and guns. When we finally won an order to disclose the photos—which would have shown the race of the people who were stopped without reason, the practice magically stopped.
“How could NH be racist with such a small minority population?” This is the question I get at my talks. According to US census data, NH’s current Black population is 2.1 percent. Its Hispanic or Latino population is 4.8 percent. A lot of the minority populations are centered in NH’s cities. Manchester’s population under 30, for example, is 30 percent Black.
I am not sure a state can be racist but I agree with my friend Peter Powell of Lancaster who said in a documentary about William Loeb that NH has some questions to answer.
For example, why was NH the very last state in America to adopt a holiday recognizing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr? Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. NH adopted a King holiday in 2000 over the objection of its statewide paper, the Union Leader.
NH was also very late in abolishing the death penalty. Abolition bills were vetoed by Governor Shaheen in 2000 and by Governor Chris Sununu in 2019. The Legislature overrode Sununu’s veto.
The death penalty is an instrument of racism, whether the US Supreme Court acknowledges it or not. In McCleskey v. Kemp the Court rejected clear statistical evidence of racial bias because the defendant failed to demonstrate a racially discriminatory purpose to match the statistical evidence. A purpose that, by the way, was likely unprovable.
When I am asked how NH could have a race issue when we have so few minorities, I pause to let the question sink in as the question itself begins to reveal the answer. Then I refer the audience to page 52 of my book.
“After a horrible murder in Roxbury, Massachusetts, Loeb wrote and published a front-page editorial that claimed the murder was:
‘typical of the savagery of some of the blacks in this country. They hate whites. . . . They have no more feeling . . . than jungle savages from the darkest parts of Africa. It is because this newspaper wants to avoid this kind of thing happening in New Hampshire that we are hopeful that the Black population will never increase from its present minimal level.’”
Loeb and his wife, Nackey, were frequently honored by the White Citizens Council of Mississippi (think the Klan without the robes) according to research conducted by former Concord Monitor reporter Meg Heckman, also cited in my book. Although Loeb failed as a newspaperman in Vermont and Massachusetts, he succeeded, even flourished, in NH. According to Peter Powell, it is reasonable to ask why Loeb flourished here.
Inequitable school funding systems are often related to racism or at least privilege protecting privilege. That’s why I wrote about Loeb and the question of racism in The Last Bake Sale. Property tax reliant systems work to the disadvantage of poor neighborhoods and the minority families who often live in them. States could rebalance the scales to make funding more fair for Black kids or Mexican American kids but seldom do.
Loeb, with help from Mel Thomson, also invented NH’s tax pledge that baked in NH’s over-reliance on the property tax to fund schools. NH political leaders reflexively adopt the Pledge and forestall any coherent investigation of our state’s system of taxation. NH’s system is the most regressive in the nation because it taxes residents of our poorest communities the most and residents of the wealthiest communities pay the lowest taxes.
If Loeb couldn’t be trusted to get the important question of race right, why should we trust him to establish NH’s tax policy for ever and ever?
The book tour is going well. I am grateful for the reception Amy and I are receiving and for the opportunity to help put fixing our broken school funding scheme back on the front burner, at least in the minds of regular NH citizens.
On Saturday, we were in Peterborough where we heard from a 1955 graduate of Claremont’s Stevens High School. Stevens was one of the best high schools in the state in the ‘50s and ‘60s when Claremont still had a thriving machining industry and textile mills were going strong supporting property values. Stevens also had one of the secret advantages of many mill towns and our friend in Peterborough confirmed this. Students could leave Stevens without graduating and still find good middle class jobs in the mills. This allowed Stevens to focus its resources on students who stayed in school. Although a generation later, this was the same experience I had in eastern Pennsylvania where I went to high school near a US Steel Mill.
Justice William Batchelder’s son, David, came to introduce himself as I was signing books in Peterborough. He was visiting Peterborough’s bookstore and heard someone (me!) mention Claremont. This perked up his ears as our litigation was a common subject for discussion around his family’s kitchen table. William Batchelder was one of the NH Supreme Court justices who ruled in our favor in Claremont I and II. I am guessing the discussions about our legal efforts were largely favorable.
This is a busy week. I’ll be at the Rotary Meeting in Henniker on May 1st at 7:30a. Then I give the keynote speech at the Hillsborough County Grassroots Dinner on May 3rd at the Puritan, starting at 5:00. I’ll be at the Rochester Library on Monday the 5th at 5:30, then the Loudon Library on the 6th at 6p. Next, I’ll be at the Claremont Community Center on Thursday the 8th at 6p. Stop by and ask a question, say hello and buy a book. LastBakeSaleBook.com.
Thank you.