The Vineyard chapter of the NAACP has concluded that a recent incident involving three children at the Chilmark Community Center summer camp was racially insensitive.
The Martha's Vineyard NAACP this week called for the immediate dismissal of John Dillon, a Tisbury police patrolman who has been charged with racism by a fellow officer.
In a three-page letter to the Gazette, the NAACP lists a series of alleged offenses by Mr. Dillon, highlighted by an incident in which the officer parodied stereotypical African-American speech when rewriting a computer document authored by Theophilus M. Silvia 3rd, the town's only year-round African-American patrolman.
The dining area of the Portuguese American Club in Oak Bluffs was filled on Monday afternoon for the annual MLK luncheon hosted by the Martha’s Vineyard Chapter of the NAACP.
In a sometimes tense, sometimes emotional debate, Oak Bluffs selectmen heard arguments for and against a request to remove plaques from a Civil War monument.
In the 1920s and ’30s, black families could not buy property in Edgartown. And although Oak Bluffs was a gathering place for black professionals back to the 19th century, their children, home from college, were seldom able to work as clerks in local shops.
When the civil rights movement spread across America in the 1960s, the Vineyard was separate in many ways. The black community here was prosperous and thriving, the regional high school was integrated and race relations were cordial.
