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Sculpture Honors First Black President of an American College

Associated Press

   RUTLAND, VERMONT - The first Black president of an American college is
   being honored with a sculpture installed in the Vermont city where he
   was born in 1826.

   The larger-than-life marble bust of Martin Henry Freeman, a scholar,
   sits on a stack of books in a downtown square as part of the Rutland
   Sculpture Trail.

   "It's a very soft, gentle portrayal of Martin Freeman," said Al
   Wakefield, one of the sponsors of the piece that was installed in
   November. "I don't know how many people remember either through
   historical writings what kind of person he was, but he's depicted as a
   very gentle, kind, literary, artsy kind of a guy."

   It's the eighth sculpture to be added to the city's sculpture trail
   aimed at celebrating local history and drawing more people to visit the
   working-class community. Among the pieces is a marble relief honoring
   the Vermont volunteers who served in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry
   Regiment, made up of African Americans soldiers, during the Civil War.

   In 1856, Freeman became president of the all-Black Allegheny Institute
   and Mission Church in the Pittsburgh area, later named Avery College.
   He attended Middlebury College in Vermont, graduating at the top of his
   class in 1849. Freeman's father fought in the American Revolution, one
   way for enslaved men to win their freedom.

   The sculptures of Freeman and the Black Civil War soldiers were
   recently added to the Vermont African American Heritage Trail, a guide
   to various spots around the state that highlights the lives of African
   Americans in Vermont.

   From the start, organizers of the sculpture trail wanted to be
   inclusive of all kinds of history, events and people, said Steve
   Costello, who came up with the idea for the trail.

   "The country is full of sculptures planned without much consideration
   of the contributions of women or minorities, so we developed a broad
   list of ideas, which included Freeman from the get-go," he said by
   email.

   Vermont racial issues

   The very white and liberal state of Vermont has struggled with issues
   of race. Two years ago, the state's only Black female lawmaker at the
   time resigned from the Legislature after receiving racist threats. At
   the end of this year, the head of the Rutland chapter of the NAACP is
   stepping down after she said she and her family had been targeted by
   racially motivated harassment.

   This fall, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd at the hands
   of Minneapolis police and the wounding of Jacob Blake in Kenosha,
   Wisconsin, protesters camped out for more than a month in a park across
   the street from the Burlington Police Department and held marches
   calling for the firing of three police officers. The officers are
   accused in lawsuits of using excessive force against two Black men in
   separate incidents in 2018.

   The Freeman sculpture, designed by Mark Burnett, who is Black, and
   carved by Don Ramey, was installed at a time when some cities are
   reconsidering and even removing sculptures or monuments related to the
   Confederacy or to other historical figures, such as Christopher
   Columbus.

   Just this week, Virginia removed a statue of Confederate General Robert
   E. Lee that has represented the state in the U.S. Capitol for 111
   years. A state commission has recommended replacing it with a statue of
   Barbara Johns, who protested conditions at her all-Black high school in
   1951. Her court case became part of the landmark Brown v. Board of
   Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court striking down racial
   segregation in public schools.

   Wakefield, a Black man who moved to Vermont from New York City 30 years
   ago and whose family helped sponsor the sculpture of Freeman, said it
   was "really, really relevant," in the context of the nationwide
   protests for racial justice and the reassessment of public statues.

   Success at Middlebury

   Freeman's academic success took hold at Middlebury College, where he
   was the only Black student in a state that was the first to abolish
   adult slavery in 1777. Abolitionists in town had urged Middlebury to
   enroll Black students as a demonstration that the school really stood
   against slavery, said William Hart, an emeritus professor of history of
   Black studies at Middlebury College.

   Freeman went on to teach mathematics and natural philosophy at
   Allegheny Institute and Mission Church in the Pittsburgh area, where he
   became president in 1856. He supported the colonization of Liberia for
   Black Americans and abruptly resigned in 1863 with a plan to teach at
   Liberia College.

   He went to Liberia, as he often said, to be a man, which he felt he
   could not be in the United States, Hart said. It was an act of
   self-determination, he said. But unlike Freeman, many of the Black
   Americans who went to Liberia were biracial, the sons and daughters of
   former enslavers, Hart said. Being dark-skinned, Freeman felt
   discrimination there, too.

   He taught at Liberia College and subsequently also became its
   president. He died in Monrovia in 1889.

   "I think that what is important for Vermonters to know is that there
   has always been a place for persons of African descent in the state of
   Vermont," said Curtiss Reed, executive director of the Vermont
   Partnership for Fairness & Diversity. He would like to see more public
   works of art like the sculpture of Freeman.

   "There are those who would say that we can deny the existence of folks
   of color as well as their contributions, whether as pastors, or as
   legislators, or as business people, as abolitionists, as veterans," he
   said. "There's a lot of education to be done."