Four Juneteenth celebrations taking place in Vermont
VERMONT (ABC22/FOX44) – Vermonters across the state will be gathering together to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States.
Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021, but it has been traditionally celebrated among African-Americans in the U.S. since 1866, shortly after Emancipation and the Civil War. Vermont was one of the first states to abolish slavery in 1777, before it became part of the U.S..
Juneteenth: The long road to becoming a federal holiday
The City of South Burlington will hold its celebration on Thursday, June 19 from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. in Veterans Memorial Park. The events will include a craft fair and music, and the city says it will be 'highlighting BIPOC food vendors and business owners as well as BIPOC-focused non-profit organizations'.
Winooski is holding its 'Juneteenth Block Party' in Rotary Park on Friday, June 20. The event is scheduled from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m..
Burlington's Juneteenth festivities will take place on Saturday, June 21 from 2:00 to 10:00 p.m., with celebrations on Church Street and in City Hall Park. City mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak welcomed the public to the event, calling it 'not just a commemoration of freedom, but a powerful statement of our commitment to racial equity and social justice in the City of Burlington.'
Will you be getting mail on Juneteenth?
Hartford, together with Bethel and Lebanon, New Hampshire, will also be holding their celebration on Saturday, June 21, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. at Lyman Point Park. The town is welcoming speakers including Vermont state senators Kesha Ram Hinsdale and Joe Major, and New Hampshire executive councillor Karen Liot Hill.
More events may still be announced. Cities across Vermont including Rutland and Essex have held events in the past, and more information may be found on your community's website or social media page.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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USA Today
2 hours ago
- USA Today
Pack a bag or pay up: Some plastic bag bans appear to be working
Plastic bag bans and fees have spread across the United States, and new research says they're doing a good job at cutting down on litter, although some rules work better than others. In places where they are in effect, plastic bag policies led to a 25% to 47% reduction in the amount of disposable, thin plastic bag litter as a proportion of the items collectioned during cleanups of America's shorelines, a study released in the journal Science in mid-June, found. In 2023, about one-in-three Americans lived in a place where some type of plastic bag regulation was in place. "Overall, we see a significant decrease in the percentage of plastic bags in coastal cleanup efforts," in areas with some type of plastic bag policy in place, said Kimberly Oremus, a professor of marine science and policy at the University of Delaware and one of the paper's co-authors. But the bans have a history of controversy too. Previous research highlighted loopholes in the laws that can keep bans from working well. Meanwhile, about 20 states have passed laws banning any plastic bag bans at all, under the argument that they preempt local control. The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council created a model bill for preemptively banning such bans in 2015. Some plastic bag bans work better than others The researchers collected information on 611 different plastic bag policies nationwide. Of those, the most common was complete bans, which made up almost 60% of policies. The next were partial bans, 31%, which usually banned thin film bags but allowed for thicker plastic bags. The least common, 8.5%, were policies that charged for bags. But that policy, which typically charges between 5¢ to 25¢ per bag, was most effective in lowering the amount of plastic bag waste found along shorelines. Complete bans on plastic bags at certain types of stores, often groceries and large retailers, also worked, but less well. Least effective were partial bans on thin film plastic bags that allow exceptions for thicker bags. Some areas with plastic bag policies in place also allow their use for take-out food and in restaurants but not in stores. "Our hypothesis is that people treat the thicker bags as single-use, even though they're not supposed to be," said Oremus. Additionally, the longer a policy had been in place, the less plastic bag litter was found, according to the study. What has previous plastic bag ban research found? The paper gives a better understanding of previous research and studies, which have sometimes found that plastic bag rules can backfire, creating more absolute plastic litter rather than less. In New Jersey, a 2024 study funded by plastic bag manufacturers found that while the number of single-use plastic bags sold declined by 60% after a bag ban took effect in 2015, the number of alternative plastic bags increased. The same thing has happened in California. The year its bag ban was passed, Californians threw away 157,385 tons of plastic bags. In 2022 that had increased to 231,072 tons, according to the report. Politicians in the state said this was because of a loophole in the original bill that allowed the sale of thicker, reusable plastic bags at the checkout stand. To fix it, beginning in 2026 California stores will only offer paper bags or washable reusable bags. Why are plastic bags a problem in the environment? There's no question that disposable plastic bags are convenient. That's why they've become so popular. The first one-piece polyethylene shopping bag was created by a Swedish company in 1962. The 1965 patent was for a "bag with handle of weldable plastic material." These bags didn't appear in U.S. grocery stores until 1979, edging out paper bags because they were significantly cheaper for grocers. By the 2000s they were everywhere, including in the landscape, harming marine animals when they got in waterways. They can be a significant problem. "Plastic bags, especially the thin plastic bags, travel very easily in the wind and wanter," said Anna Papp, an environmental economist at Columbia University. "Because of that, their impact on animals and ecosystems can be outsized." 'When a plastic bag escapes into the environment, animals can see it as a food source and ingest it. It can cause entrapment and entanglement," Shelie Miller, professor of sustainable systems at the School for Environment Sustainability at the University of Michigan, told USA TODAY last year. An app called Clean Swell allows cleanup crews to track the entanglement of dead or injured fish, birds and animals. The researchers found somewhere between a 30% to 37% reduction in entangled animals in shorelines near plastic bag policies. The data isn't fully clear because plastic bags aren't the only thing that causes entanglement, they said. "We find suggestive evidence that the occurrence of entanglements decreases when these policies are in place," said Papp. How did researchers figure out if plastic bag bans work? The researchers took advantage of a natural experiment. The environmental group Ocean Conservancy sponsors thousands of beach, river and lake cleanups every year. It also built a simple to use app called Clean Swell that allows cleanup groups to record information about the trash they collected. Papp and Oremus took advantage of the fact that there's a patchwork of bans and fees for plastic bags – they found 611 individual policies across the nation. Then they combined that with cleanup data from around the country between 2016 and 2023 in 182 ZIP codes. Next they combined this crowdsourced citizen-scientist data from 45,067 shoreline cleanups recorded in the Clean Swell app. Plastic bags were the fifth-most common item found in shoreline cleanups, after cigarette butts, food wrappers, plastic bottle caps and plastic beverage bottles. On average, plastic bags made up 6.7% of items collected in 2023. That allowed them to look at the differences between a specific area before and after a plastic bag policy was enacted, as well as a natural control group when they looked at areas that have never had any plastic bag policies. When they looked at the numbers of bottles and straws, they found those items did not decrease, indicating that plastic bag policies were at work rather than simply changes in what was entering the environment.
Buzz Feed
11 hours ago
- Buzz Feed
Old Photo Reveals Truth About Missing Mom
I tried not to stare when I first saw her. Her gaunt, heavily lined face made her look older than I expected. She wore a dingy pumpkin-orange thrift-store turtleneck that swallowed her 5-foot-7, 98-pound frame. But her ice-blue eyes sparkled like a kid's on Christmas morning. 'Oh boy! Oh boy,' she said, walking toward me with outstretched arms. 'It's so good to see you!' That was the first of many visits. Most followed the same script: her astonished joy upon my arrival, my mechanical hug, and then sitting on her couch to talk about her favorite topic, classic torch love songs from the 1950s and early '60s. 'Who's the better singer?' I'd ask. 'Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole?' She'd close her eyes to ponder. 'Nat King Cole,' she'd announce, nodding in reverence. After about an hour, I'd stand to leave. Her smile would evaporate. Another awkward hug. As I left, she'd call out, 'Don't take any wooden nickels.' On the surface, we had nothing in common. She was a white Irish Catholic woman who grew up in a famil y that freely used the N-word, thought that Black people were lazy, and believed that Black and white people should live apart. I was a young Black man who grew up primarily in foster homes in a Black inner-city neighborhood where just about everyone — including me — regarded white people with distrust or contempt. Yet she was my mother. And, as the years have passed, she's become something else. She's the person I find myself turning to when I struggle with the mixture of emotions that so many Americans are experiencing right now. Many of us are exhausted, demoralized, and drained by constant political and racial divisions. Countless Americans have become, as author David Brooks put it in a recent essay, 'passive, discouraged. … They've lost the confidence to wish for more.' I've been swimming in this grim national mood for years. As a journalist at CNN and elsewhere, I've covered virtually every so-called racially transformative event in America during the past 32 years, from the Rodney King riots in 1992 to the George Floyd 'racial reckoning.' All of them generated massive hope for transformational change; all were followed by a massive letdown. At my lowest moments, I've wondered whether human beings are too susceptible to racism and tribalism to make democracy work. But my mother offered another way to look at the future, without ever intending to do so. She was a person who seemed to have no power or reason to hope. Still she, and others like her, gave me the confidence to wish for more. *** In the beginning, I thought I'd never know her. When I was born in the mid-1960s, interracial marriage and intimate interracial relationships were illegal in Maryland, as in much of the country. My mother vanished from my life not long after I was born, and so did her family. No one told me why. I didn't know what she looked like. My father's name was on my birth certificate, but hers was not. All he told me and my younger brother, Patrick, was this: 'Your mother's name is Shirley, she's white, and her family hates Black people.' Their hatred did not surprise me. I grew up in a West Baltimore neighborhood that served as the setting for the HBO series ,, a crime drama that depicted a Black inner-city community ravaged by racism and drug violence. I routinely heard my friends and neighbors refer to white people as 'honkies' and 'crackers.' I heard white people yell 'Nigger!' when I strayed into their neighborhoods. During my entire time in Baltimore's public schools — from Head Start to high school graduation — I saw only one white student. It wasn't the time or place to be biracial. There were no biracial public figures like former President Barack Obama or former Vice President Kamala Harris when I grew up in the 1970s and early '80s. I was too ashamed to tell anyone my mother was white. I marked her race as 'Black' on school forms. I became a closeted biracial person. At 17, though, I discovered that there was one place worse than my neighborhood: where I first met my mom. There was another reason why I tried not to stare when I first saw her. I was trying to hide my emotions because I was in shock. I was standing in the waiting room of a psychiatric facility called Crownsville Hospital Center in rural Maryland. My mother had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, a severe mental illness. I didn't make that discovery until I met her in Crownsville. No one in my family, including my father, had told me — not even on the car ride to the hospital. They didn't know how. My father had waited until I had graduated from high school to suddenly ask me one day if I wanted to meet my mom. He didn't think I could handle knowing about her illness until I became a young man. Many people didn't talk openly about mental illness in their families when I met my mother in the early 1980s. For over 30 years, I blocked out most of the memories from that first meeting, but one detail lingered. Before I left, my mother looked at me and made a request. 'Will you send me a St. Jude prayer book?' she asked. 'Ah, yeah, I will,' I said, not knowing at the time that St. Jude is the patron saint of hopeless causes. Outwardly, I didn't skip a beat after that meeting. I attended and graduated from Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C., where Kamala Harris was a classmate. I became a journalist at several newspapers before joining CNN. But I had stepped out of one closet into another. Now, I was ashamed that my mother had a mental illness. I didn't even tell my closest friends. It took two years to tell the woman I would date and marry about my mom's illness — and another two into our marriage before allowing them to meet. In the life I hid from others, I tried to build a relationship with my mom. I wrote her a flood of letters, telling her about myself, my dreams and my hope that we could get to know each other. There would be no reply for months, and then a letter would finally arrive. I'd tear it open to find a single sheet from a yellow legal pad, with large cursive letters spilling over the margins: ' Dear John! I could use some money and to see you in person. Could you send a picture of yourself and Pat for Mother's Day? I need another St. Jude prayer book. Love, Shirley. ' Personal visits were no better. She would drift away in the middle of conversations. She'd forget what we talked about two minutes earlier. Her lips would tremble, and she'd lapse into silence if I asked too many questions about her past. At times, she'd sense my frustration, turn to me and say with a rueful smile, 'Don't mind me. I'm crazy.' Each visit left me more depressed. My mother had been a mystery when I had no contact with her — and even more so once she was in my life. Her mental illness was like a thick fog; I didn't know how to navigate around it to see her. All I could see was schizophrenia. In my 30s, I gave up. I stopped writing her letters and trying to reach her through conversations. I kept visiting her and mailing her St. Jude trinkets, but I was just checking a box. Our visits were filled with awkward silences. I didn't expect our relationship to change. One day, when my wife, Terry, asked me why I didn't talk more about my mother, I cut her off. 'All I do is send her money,' I said with a heavy sigh. 'I can't really communicate with her. There's nothing left to tell.' *** But there was so much to her story that had not been told. One night, when I was about 19, my father reached into a Ziploc bag and pulled out a sepia-stained black-and-white photo. In the photo, a young white woman with a beehive hairdo looked at the camera with a wide, dimpled smile. She was holding a cigarette in her right hand and looked like she was about to burst into laughter. She looked confident, and her eyes sparkled with intelligence and mischief. It was my mother. The photo was taken when she was 20, the same year she gave birth to me. I couldn't stop staring at the photo. It bore little resemblance to the fragile woman I knew. I set out to learn about the woman in that photo. I pressed relatives to talk about my parents' relationship. I knew the outline: They met in 1963 at a hospital in downtown Baltimore. My mother was a nurse's assistant, and my father, Clifton Sr., was in the Merchant Marines. Their first date was a disaster. My father couldn't persuade a Black cabdriver to take him to my mom's house because she lived in a white working-class neighborhood where no Blacks dared venture. When my father finally did knock on her door, her father answered. He tried to shove my father off the doorstep and called the police. 'This nigger is trying to see my daughter,' my mother's father told the arriving officers. They arrested my father for disturbing the peace. My mother decided that she would visit my father instead. She started taking walks toward my father's house in West Baltimore, which was the central meeting place for my father's extended family. My relatives described her as 'quick-witted,' 'chatty' and driven to help people in need. She sat on my father's front steps, smoking Marlboro cigarettes with my uncles, and hung out in the kitchen to watch my paternal grandmother, Daisy, sing Negro spirituals while baking sweet potato pies. My father's family didn't know what to make of her. In the early 1960s, white politicians routinely warned against the evils of 'race-mixing.' Psychiatrists declared in scholarly journals that whites who married or 'mated' with Blacks had a death wish or sought an outlet for 'deviant' sexual urges. Baltimore passed the nation's first racially restrictive housing law in 1910, which banned Black people from buying homes in white neighborhoods and vice versa, and was heavily segregated when my parents met. My father's relatives chuckled as they recalled a 20-year-old white woman walking alone into an all-Black neighborhood to see a Black man. 'It was like a breakthrough,' my cousin Reese recalled. 'She was a white woman on the block, not scared, not worried about being attacked, not looking over her shoulder. She didn't seem to be conscious of her color. She was like one of the family.' I then heard stories that filled a hole in my heart that I didn't even know was there. Unprompted, relatives recounted memories of a doting young mom who took her two children on walks in the park, rubbed her nose against their bellies while they giggled and sang Patsy Cline and Tony Bennett songs to them. My mom loved to sing one song in particular to me, Doris Day's ' Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be).' Try as I might, though, I have no memories of those moments. Mercifully, I also have no memory of what happened next. My mother's illness became apparent after she gave birth to Patrick, nine months after I was born. She started drifting away during conversations, chain-smoking and disappearing for long solitary walks. She couldn't keep a job. When my parents moved into an apartment together, she'd leave with the gas stove on or the front door ajar. My parents never married. 'She tried, but she didn't have the capacity to do normal things,' my father told me. 'She wanted to be accepted like normal people.' And then one day, my relatives said, she disappeared. Years later, Patrick accidentally discovered the reason why while consulting her Social Security records. Her father had placed her in a psychiatric facility, a not uncommon fate in the 1950s and early 1960s for white women in interracial relationships. Hearing how my parents' relationship ended left me emotionally numb. I no longer wanted to know more about my mother — every story seemed to end in tragedy. I thought I would never meet any semblance of the vibrant woman in that old photograph. But there was another side to those stories about my mom that I had overlooked. It was her 'marvelous victory.' *** Part of that victory can be seen in a viral photograph from last year that is now forgotten because the news cycle has moved on. It's a snapshot of Kamala Harris taken last summer during her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was shot from the point of view of a brown biracial girl in a pink pantsuit and pigtails, transfixed as she gazes upward at Harris from the front row at the United Center in Chicago. The girl is Amara, Harris' great-niece, age 8. It's easy to see why the photo went viral. It was a sneak preview of a Brown New America. The U.S. is projected to become a majority-minority country (the majority of citizens will be non-white) by 2044. The number of people who identify as multiracial increased by 276% over the past decade. Advertisements today routinely depict interracial couples, straight and gay, along with their children. And some of our most prominent public figures — Obama, Harris, film director Jordan Peele and NFL quarterback Patrick Mahomes — are biracial. The acceptance of interracial marriage cuts across racial and partisan lines. Harris and Doug Emhoff, her Jewish husband, were the first interracial couple to reach the highest levels of the executive branch, but they were immediately followed by another interracial couple, GOP Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants. Some white supremacists objected to Usha Vance's race but even within the MAGA universe there is widespread acceptance of the Vances' interracial marriage. Someday, perhaps soon, an interracial couple will occupy the White House. It's easy to miss, but Usha Vance's ascension and Harris' groundbreaking run for the White House represents one of the greatest victories of the Civil Rights Movement: the normalization of interracial marriage and biracial people throughout America. When Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice in 2022, few if any news stories dwelled on the fact that her husband is white. The casual acceptance of interracial couples at even the highest echelon of American life demonstrates something that's so important to remember today: how quickly people's attitudes on seemingly intractable issues can shift. When a Gallup poll asked Americans about their views on marriage between Black and white people in 1958, only 4% approved. Gallup asked the same question in 2021, and 94% approved — an all-time high. Public opinion about one of the most entrenched racial taboos in American history went from near-universal disapproval to virtual universal approval within a lifetime. How did this happen? The quick answer is that in June 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down 'anti-miscegenation' laws in the Loving v. Virginia case. But something else also made it happen. It was a choice that certain people made and a type of courage they all displayed. One of them was my mom. I only saw my mom as this fragile flower, but my brother, Patrick, was the first to notice another side to her. One morning, he took her to a hair salon that served women in a group home where our mom lived. She had been transferred to the home with other women with severe mental illnesses after Crownsville was shut down, in part, for mistreating patients. While they were waiting, our mom watched a hairdresser berate and throw hair products at a woman sitting in her chair. 'She's a bitch,' my mom said, her eyes narrowed on the hairdresser. Patrick had never heard our mother speak in such an indignant tone before. He suppressed a smile. 'Mom, do you know you just said a bad word?' 'I'm sorry, Pat.' Our mom briefly paused, then added, 'But she is a bitch.' As I dug deeper into old family stories, I discovered that my mom had long been infuriated by any display of injustice. She glared back at white people who stared at her while she walked in public with my father in the early 1960s. Sometimes she'd say, 'You act like you ain't never seen people before.' She and my father trashed a bar when the bartender refused to serve them. Once, I heard my mom say she had been arrested as a young woman. For what, I inquired. 'For opening my big fat mouth,' she said with a wide grin. Even her illness couldn't erase her spirit of defiance. I hated visiting her group homes. Some were run by good people who treated my mom with compassion, but many seemed designed to crush whatever humanity was left of those consigned there. Unscrupulous caretakers stole from or bullied people in their care. Some confined them to squalid, roach-infested rooms. When I came in to greet my mom, I'd often see heavily medicated residents sitting on couches, staring zombie-like at soap operas on television. Most of them hadn't received a visitor in years. There were few smiles or genuine laughter in these environments. But my mom could somehow bring light into the most desolate places. Patrick sneaked into a group home to surprise our mom one morning, only to be shocked by what he saw: our mother bopping and weaving down a 'Soul Train' dance line as the group home staff and residents cheered her on. Any gifts we sent her quickly disappeared because, we discovered, she gave most of them away to other group home members who she said needed them more. And when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, her caretaker had to buy a separate living room chair for my mom to enforce social distancing rules. All of the group home members wanted to sit near her. I didn't appreciate the depth of her defiance until I was in my mid-50s, when I did something that I had never done: I traveled to her childhood home in Baltimore. On an overcast summer morning, I drove to Mill Hill, my mother's childhood community. She lived on Wilkins Avenue, on a quintessential Baltimore block of gleaming marble steps, neat row houses and a still-stately St. Benedict Church, where my mom was confirmed. I parked my rental car and walked to the spot where my father had been assaulted and arrested for trying to date my mother over 50 years ago. I scanned the street to see white, Black and brown neighbors talking to one another from their front steps and hanging out together at a corner tavern. I was surprised by something other than the racial mix. When I looked at my smartphone's app, I was stunned to discover that my father's former home was only 4.1 miles away. I had no idea that my estranged white and Black relatives had lived so close to one another. Racial segregation was so entrenched when my parents met that their families might as well have lived in separate solar systems. Baltimore's segregation wasn't just racial; it was also ethnic. Jews, Italians and Poles kept to their neighborhoods. Outsiders, particularly those who had the 'wrong' color, risked getting hurt walking into the wrong area. As I stood in front of my mom's childhood home, I imagined for the first time what it must have been like for her. The contemporary Wilkins Avenue landscape dissolved, and the circa early 1960s Wilkins Avenue appeared. I saw her — a thin, young white woman with a beehive hairdo — close the front door and walk toward a neighborhood to meet people her family and community had told her to hate. I paused outside my car and shook my head in admiration, and confusion. Damn, I thought. Why would she take such a risk? I'm still not quite sure. Was my mother's relationship with my father driven by youthful rebellion, the allure of a taboo relationship, or was it an early symptom of the illness that would engulf her? Or was it truly love? I learned through others that my parents remained close after she was institutionalized. My father routinely visited my mother and continued to take care of her even when his health began to fail late in his life. What I do know is that she did something that remains so important: She refused to accept the status quo. My mother was part of a vanguard of Black, brown and white people who would smash a taboo against interracial relationships that had been enshrined as law for centuries. They didn't wait for the Supreme Court or politicians to tell them whom to love. I was born four years before the Loving decision. Like most big changes, it started small, with countless acts of invisible courage from everyday people. My mother's decision to walk from Wilkins Avenue to my father's house ' sent forth a tiny ripple of hope.' That ripple fed into another, emboldening others to do the same. Those ripples eventually turned into a tsunami that gave us the Loving decision and a New America — one where a brown girl in a pink pantsuit could look at a biracial woman making a credible run for the White House or another brown woman at the White House today and think, 'That could be me one day.' This was the same dynamic that gave us marriage equality. Everyday people acted first, coming out to their parents, friends and co-workers; the politicians and courts followed later. As I returned to my car and drove away from Wilkins Avenue, I smiled. I felt a warm sensation well up in my chest, and something else that I'd never felt before about my mom: pride. Pride that I was her son. She was no hopeless cause. She was more powerful than she realized. She, and others like her, helped make Usha Vance and Kamala Harris possible. The historian and activist Howard Zinn said there is a tendency among people 'to think that what we see in the present moment will continue.' He said people often forget how often throughout history people have been astonished by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, and 'by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.' He said that if people only look at the worst in the past and present, it destroys their capacity to act. 'And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future,' Zinn wrote. 'The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.' *** After Wilkins Avenue, my visits to my mom changed. I painted her fingernails. I asked her to sing 'Que Sera Sera.' I asked her to show me some dance moves. And I laughed along with her as she did a little shimmy of her hips. I stopped dwelling on what I had lost; I became grateful for what remained. My wife noticed. 'You used to hug your mom like she was an eggshell and get frustrated when you couldn't talk to her the way you wanted,' Terry told me one night. 'And now?' I asked her. 'You hug her tighter now, and you're not afraid of the silence when you talk to her.' During one of my last visits with my mom, Terry took a photo that I treasure. We stopped by my mother's group home in Baltimore on a luminous summer day with oak trees in full bloom. That visit followed the same script: a ring of the doorbell, the scurrying of footsteps behind the front door, and my mom gleefully shouting, 'Oh my Lord, Oh my Lord!' Terry's smartphone camera snapped what happened after the front door swung open. I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around my mother as she pillowed her face on my shoulder, a contented smile on her face. If I could have written a caption for that photo, it would be the final words I wrote to her not long after that visit — words that she never saw. It's what I wished I could have said to her so many years earlier. ' Now I see you, Mom. I finally see you.' John Blake is an award-winning journalist for He is the author of 'More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.' Blake's memoir has won five book awards, including the 2024 Christopher Awards, which celebrates books that 'affirm the highest values of the human spirit.' Blake has spoken at colleges, symposiums and in documentaries on race, religion and politics. He is a graduate of Howard University and a native of Baltimore. For more info, visit his website. This story originally ran on HuffPost in February 2025 and was re-published on June 12, 2025 — the 58th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision, as part of HuffPost Personal's 'Best Of' series today.
American Press
2 days ago
- American Press
Foreign exchange student reflects on year in the US
This year's DeRidder Rotary Club scholarship recipients are Helena Thompson, Grace Lovitt, Gabriel McKee, Victor Storer, Hunter Gill, Mikayla Bonds and Collin Nortman. Five of the recipients are pictured with Club President Erin Chesnutt. (Special to the American Press) The Rotary Club of DeRidder has given out more than $500,000 in scholarships for over 60 years — and they awarded $20,000 more this month. Scholarships were presented to seven students who were required to write an essay, achieve an ACT composite score of 19 or higher, maintain a 3.0 grade-point average and create a short video introducing themselves and stating where they plan to attend school in the fall. Club President Erin Chesnutt said this is the second year the program has been offered to students attending traditional colleges and universities and those entering vocational or trade schools. This year's recipients are Helena Thompson, Grace Lovitt and Gabriel McKee of Rosepine High School; Victor Storer of Merryville High School; Hunter Gill and Mikayla Bonds of DeRidder High School; and Collin Nortman of East Beauregard High School. The guest speaker for this month's Rotary Club meeting was Dou Sugisawa, an exchange student from Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan, who has been studying at Comeaux High School in Lafayette. She was hosted by Paula Mendoza, who is the Rotarian Club of Lafayette treasurer and Rotarian District Youth Exchange Officer. She has hosted Sugisawa — whose father is a rotarian in Japan — for 11 months. 'I got to see the world through Dou's eyes and experience things that we normally take for granted. She is the most courageous person I've ever met; she's jumped into everything I would put in front of her,' Mendoza said. Sugisawa finished her sophomore school year in Lafayette with a 3.9 GPA and took the ACT test for fun and made a 23. Mendoza said Sugisawa can accomplish anything she sets her mind to and considers herself lucky to have witnessed her extraordinary growth. Sugisawa was Mendoza's first rotarian foreign exchange student. Mendoza said a month before Sugisawa's stay with her, they started emailing back and forth. They met for the first time in Baton Rouge the day Sugisawa arrived in America. Mendoza said she has learned a lot from Sugisawa — such as the different customs between the two countries and how Americans can be louder and more boisterous while the Japanese are traditionally very quiet. Mendoza said the first few weeks Sugisawa was with her, she'd ask her how her day had gone in school. She said Sugisawa initially told her she doesn't like to talk about 'personal things.' Within three weeks, however, Sugisawa said she would look forward to telling Mendoza about her day at school. Sugisawa also started calling Mendoza 'Mom.' 'Before she got here, she had written in one of her letters, 'I don't like to be touched, if you want to hug me, please ask first,' and I wrote back, 'This might be trouble because you're coming to the south, the land of huggers,' and now months later, she hugs everybody,' Mendoza said. 'In Japan nobody hugs, I don't even hug with my own father, mother or siblings. People are so friendly here, even in the grocery stores. In Japan you don't talk to strangers in the grocery store, but I like this style,' Sugisawa said. Sugisawa said in Japan people show love and care in other forms. 'People show affection more privately and will take care of you, cook for you, it's more of an act of service,' she said. Sugisawa said she has experienced a lot while in the States — including seeing an alligator and learning to make a roux. Crawfish etouffee is her favorite Louisiana cuisine, and she said she will be taking Mendoza's crawfish etouffee recipe back to Japan with her. Bread pudding is her favorite dessert, Mendoza said. 'Everywhere we went she'd try the bread pudding if it was on the menu.' Sugisawa's experience in an American school is very different from that in Japan. She said the biggest difference is how here students switch classrooms each hour, whereas in Japan the teacher switches classes and the students stay in the same classroom, with the same students all day. 'It's not just switching classrooms, either, the relationships are also different because I'd spend all day with the same classmates in Japan,' she said. Field days and pep rallies are also not held in Japan. 'I think students at Comeaux High School have more freedom than at my school at home because my school in Japan has a very strict uniform, you are not allowed to dye your hair, wear any kind of jewelry or wear makeup in school,' she explained. Mendoza and Sugisawa traveled a lot while she was in the states. Both said a trip to Colorado was their favorite. 'Even though where she lives, in Sappara, they get the snow, they don't go skiing or play in it, it's all about education,' Mendoza said. Sugisawa will be taking a two-week East Coast trip with other foreign exchange students before flying home to Japan this summer. She will get to experience Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., South Carolina and Disney World in Florida. Sugisawa is most excited to see the Statue of Liberty. Sugisawa said she looks forward to returning home and seeing her parents and three siblings again. Mendoza plans to visit Sugisawa next year in Japan.
