A Burlington boarding school has decided to take down a portrait of a bishop — who is the reason the school exists where it does today — because of his support for slavery.
Rock Point School, a private, nondenominational organization, came to the conclusion with a group of students last week that the portrait of Bishop John Henry Hopkins should be removed from its front entry. Hopkins wrote a book in 1861 arguing that slavery is justified by the Bible and is not a sinful practice.
“It became very obvious that [the portrait] shouldn’t be front and center in our school,” student Delaney Gustavsen told VTDigger in an interview Thursday.
“Because that’s not something that represents us as a community. I think we represent a diverse background of students who are here to become better people and be here as a community,” Gustavsen said. “And that is not what Bishop John Hopkins represents.”
Hopkins, who was the first bishop of the Episcopal Diocese in Vermont, built the building in the mid-1800s that now houses the high school. The grounds were originally used as his home and later as an Episcopal teaching ground.
The building, which sits on Lake Champlain next to the former Burlington High School, is a grand stone structure. It now has a Black Lives Matter flag flying under its entrance, where the title “Bishop Hopkins Hall” remains.
The decision to remove Hopkins’ portrait began with a sort of book club. Bishop Shannon MacVean-Brown read Hopkins’ book with the leaders of the Episcopal Diocese and Rock Point School, including C.J. Spirito, the head of school, and Abbey Baker, the lead English teacher.
MacVean-Brown is the first African American bishop of the Episcopal Diocese in Vermont, and the first African American woman to be a bishop leading a diocese in New England. She said the church values reconciliation, and so when she began researching Hopkins’ life, she knew his connection to slavery needed to be discussed among her congregation.
“I was curious about our history,” MacVean-Brown said. “It’s significant that this many years later as the 11th bishop, a Black woman he would consider inferior, is now the head of this church.”
Conversations about race and the legacy of slavery trickled into English class, where students were reading works by James Baldwin, one of the 20th century’s greatest writers; he broke new literary ground with his exploration of racial and social issues. Students also confronted the history of racism in the United States and, in doing so, they confronted their own school’s history with slavery.
“And so the connection was pretty natural,” Baker said, “to have the students join this conversation about what we do with these kinds of footprints from the past.”
A smaller portrait of Hopkins has been hung in the chapel at Rock Point, which is used for English classes. Next to it is a note written by students that contextualizes Hopkins’ contributions to the Episcopal Diocese with his history of supporting slavery.
At first, student David Bonnen said he thought the hallway portrait just looked scary. It stood in stark contrast to the welcoming community that Rock Point is, he said.
“Literally right as you open the door, he’s staring down at you from like 30 feet away,” Bonnen said.
“I thought it was kind of a symbolic gesture,” Bonnen said, referring to the portrait’s removal. “But then I realized that symbolic gestures can actually have a lot of power.”
Rock Point is one school out of many in Vermont — one of the whitest states in the nation — that is confronting its history with racism. The Danville School recently elected to retire its Indian mascot and the Rutland School Board, which retired its Rutland Raider mascot last year, is wrestling with an effort to bring it back.
MacVean-Brown said she knows some will take issue with the painting being removed. People are complicated, she said, and while Hopkins did great things in his life, he also supported the enslavement of people — a practice that directly affected MacVean-Brown’s own family. Her grandmother’s father was sold into slavery by his slaveowner father, she said.
“It’s important that we know that there was actually a person who said these things. A person in the same faith as me who, if we were contemporaries, would think that I was, you know, not quite as good or as human,” MacVean-Brown said.
“And so that’s why it’s important to not have to have that constant looming and honoring image present all the time in people’s faces,” she said. “And to put it into perspective.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Burlington’s Rock Point School removes portrait of bishop who supported slavery.
