BENNINGTON — Mia Schultz has lived in Bennington County with her extended family for about eight years. She currently serves as one of the commissioners for the Vermont Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a newly formed and mandated commission tasked with looking at discrimination in the past and how it has affected our current reality. She’s the President of the Rutland NAACP, the longest-serving civil rights organization in the nation. Schultz briefly served as a Bennington County representative before a series of racial discrimination incidents forced her to resign from her position.
“For me, Juneteenth was always a point of connection to our community,” Schultz said. “What Juneteenth represents is actual freedom.”
Juneteenth, or “Freedom Day,” is a national holiday celebrating freedom from enslavement after the Emancipation Proclamation. In 2021, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law, celebrating the day federal troops officially announced slave emancipation in Texas in 1863.
“It took time for the notification that slaves were finally free,” Schultz said. “We didn’t have social media. We didn’t have any means to know until the armies came through to inform everybody that they, indeed, were free. June 19th was the actual day they were first notified in Galveston, Texas. We’re talking about people who have been enslaved and stolen from their homelands for over two centuries, and so this is the vernacular that came out of it. June 19th became Juneteenth. This is what we celebrate. We call it Jubilee Day, but it’s Freedom Day because it’s the day we actually gained our real independence.”
Schultz told us the celebration of Juneteenth has always been a part of her life growing up in Arizona.
“I’m bi-racial, so one of the ways that I would connect with the black community would be during Juneteenth,” she says. “We would have entertainment. We would eat red cake, red velvet cake, and have red-flavored sodas and red Kool-Aid. Red, green, and black are important colors to us. These are the Pan-African colors. Red represents the blood that was spilled and the sacrifices that have been made by black people over the centuries who were snatched from their homelands. Green is for the land that they cultivated, the land that we have all been able to enjoy. And black is for the for the people.”
“I’m still learning pieces of the history of Juneteenth,” Schultz said. “I just always knew it as a place where we found joy, and celebration and didn’t have to fight for and advocate for ourselves because that’s our everyday reality. Whether it comes from housing, whether it comes from our employment, whether it comes from our education, there’s always a component of fighting, even to this day. So, this is an opportunity to set that down, enjoy each other, and enjoy the moment that we could once again be together. When we think about 200 years of chattel slavery and the horrors that came with that, including the separation of families and communities, in particular, the changing of our identities and our names and everything, we have this opportunity to come together and just celebrate one another.”
When asked about Juneteenth on a personal level, specifically: “besides celebrating the community, what does Juneteenth mean to you?” Schultz doesn’t hesitate to answer.
“We have this unified collective time to celebrate our freedom, our liberty, and our right to exist. It literally means everything. We’ve had 400 years in this country, 200 years of that in slavery. We’ve had challenges all along the way. We came through the civil rights movement thinking we are now a post-racial society. We are not. There are still all these messages told on television and in many other instances that black people might be dangerous, that black people are lazy, that they are dishonest. We still have to overcome that bias to show that we are human beings. It’s exhausting, quite frankly.”
Schultz feels it’s especially tiring with the continued interactions between police and the minority community.
“We have two very different memories of police in this country,” Schultz says. “There are people who believe that police protect them, and they do. That keeps them safe. That is their memory, their truth, their reality. We have a different truth and reality, one where we are followed, one where we are unreasonably stopped and searched, and one where we have, in the past, for generations, been beaten and murdered. What is freedom if we have to live in fear of the police instead of feeling that we are protected by the police. Even if my neighbors know me as a human individual, they don’t know that at the police station. If you look at the data, black and brown people are the people most likely to be pulled over. Still to this day. You understand this on such a cellular level as a minority.”
So, how do we come together when we have two different, conflicting memories?
“We can have respect for police and the job they do, but yet know what the history is. I do believe that we have to get to that place. I don’t believe that we’re there yet. It goes back to people being able to hear and accept the different perspectives on both ends. How do we address that if we can’t sit in that uncomfortable space where we can try to understand and move forward?”
Schultz says that while living in a place like Vermont can sometimes be challenging, she’s also found a welcoming community.
“I find that to be the way that we are able to thrive here is to be able to find that community,” Schultz said. “I just had a big graduation for my two kids, and when I tell you, every walk of life was here, white people, people of color, black people, every type of people. Wouldn’t it be great to see that more often. I feel more hope right now. I came into this neighborhood in February and was immediately greeted by my neighbors, given a pie, added to the group chat, all of these things that welcomed us to the neighborhood. I felt, at first, like, is this for real? What’s going on? Then, we’ve gotten to know people in our neighborhood. We feel really welcome here.”
Isn’t that the key? On a human level, to actually get to know people, and they get to know you?
“I do believe that,” Schultz says. “I also know that our systems still have flawed people who don’t want to know the other on an interpersonal level, and, even if they did, they’re within a flawed system. Just because you proclaim no racism doesn’t mean that everything’s fixed, nor does that mean that we trust you over hundreds and hundreds of years of oppression. It’s going to take a lot of those interpersonal interactions and a lot of really difficult conversations.”
Do you see hope? Do you see incremental change happening over the next few years?
“That’s so tough because it’s been so personal for me,” Schultz said. “I do see hope in my children, that my children were models for the community to show, and that there are so many other children who are models, as well as children of color. I see that our kids are changing the outlook and maybe the biases that might be existing in this community. I see that hope in our future for our youth. Yet I still see a lot of things that the older generation, who are still somewhat stuck in their bias, is not able to confront — some of the discomfort.”
When asked what she might want non-minorities to understand about Juneteenth, Schultz pauses, then answers with a passionate, unwavering voice.
“I want people to understand that freedom looks different for all of us, that freedom is something that we have different memories of,” Schultz says. “That we can educate each other and understand our different points of view. I hope Juneteenth celebrations can lead to those frank discussions that are necessary and sometimes uncomfortable. That’s the only possible way forward.”
