A White Supremacist Hounded a Black Lawmaker Out of Office
If I asked you to guess which state in 2018 had an African-American elected official hounded out of office after enduring two years of racist abuse that no one seemed able to stop, most likely you’d guess Mississippi, Alabama, or some other Deep South backwater.
But to the dismay of progressives, the answer is Vermont. That’s right: State Representative Ruqaiyah “Kiah” Morris, 42, who was the legislature’s only black female elected official, resigned in September 2018, to the shock of many Vermonters, following racist threats, primarily from a white supremacist in the state named Max Misch.
And last Monday, Morris held a press conference at the Congregation Beth El synagogue in Bennington to discuss her travails. "All of the accounts of what happened to me and my family over the years are enormous in scale and historically rooted in a legacy of white supremacy, misogyny and inequity," Morris said. "We did everything that we were told to do, reported everything, held nothing back and trusted in a system that, in the end, was insufficient and inept at addressing and repairing the harm done. In the end, we were told there was nothing to be done.”