North Swanzey, n.h.
Photos of a Confederate flag and a racially charged T-shirt on sale at the Cheshire Fair spurred an uproar this past weekend, drawing in a state chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement and prompting dozens of phone calls in complaint.
Now, days after the outrage, the fair likely will be reviewing its vendor policies in response to the controversy, according to Mark Florenz, treasurer of the Cheshire County Fair.
The pair of photos, posted to the Black Lives Matter NH Facebook page, depicted two items on display by vendors, deemed by many to be racist or racially insensitive.
One image showed a Confederate flag — flying opposite an American flag — on the corner of a tent used to sell merchandise. The star-adorned banner was used as a battle flag during the Civil War by the Confederacy and has proven fiercely controversial for its common associations with white supremacy and slavery.
Another image showed a T-shirt for sale bearing the words “Black Flies Matter,” an alteration on the Black Lives Matter movement, an activist campaign against racism and police violence. Opponents of the provocative T-shirt argued it implicitly compares people of color to insects.
The photos were accompanied by a post from the New Hampshire activist group asking the movement’s supporters to call the fair’s office phone number.
Fair officials documented approximately 50 phone calls made on Saturday and Sunday in opposition to the displays, according to Florenz, who added that the complaints tied up the fair’s phone line for hours. This year the fair ran from last Thursday through Sunday.
Despite careful documentation of the calls, Florenz said he doesn’t believe the fair took official action against the vendors.
Some who commented on the Facebook posts reported seeing some of the items taken down after the protests, but those claims couldn’t be verified, and others made contradicting observations.
But in lieu of direct action against the vendors this year, Florenz said that the complaints will likely prompt the four-person executive committee to propose a policy change, something that would need to be approved by the 18-member board of directors.
“We’re going to certainly have lots of discussion after the fair on how to address this going forward,” he said, adding that the fair does not have an official policy relating to offensive displays.
Florenz said on Monday he didn’t immediately have the names of the vendors in question and added that he would not be authorized to release them if he did.
Cheshire Fair Association President Laurie Burt could not be reached for comment by the Keene Sentinel on Monday.
The NH1.com news website on Tuesday said Burt, as a proponent of freedom of speech, believes that people who did not like such items did not have to buy them.
Burt, who picks the vendors to sell at the fair, told NH1.com that she and other fair officials did not take issue with the “Black Flies Matter” T-shirt.
“It’s a play on words, and if you’re sensitive to that, then you need to take the word ‘black’ out of everything,” Burt said.
The photos were posted Saturday morning by Black Lives Matter NH, a small, Concord- and Manchester-based offshoot of the national movement, according to a group spokeswoman.
A woman had messaged the organization’s Facebook page Friday evening and shared the photos, said the spokeswoman, who declined to identify herself due to what she says is a history of threats made against her and the organization.
That woman — who gave a phone interview on Monday but requested anonymity due to similar fears of threats — told The Sentinel she decided to reach out to Black Lives Matter NH because her earlier effort to get the Cheshire Fair to take the offending items down had failed.
The woman, who grew up in New Hampshire and now lives in Brattleboro, Vt., said she originally had arrived last Thursday with her young son and was taken aback by the presence of a half-American, half-Confederate flag flying from one of the vendor tents near one of the entrances.
“I was just shocked, because this is New Hampshire, we fought for the Union, so there really is no call for Confederate flags up here other than racist reasons, in my mind,” she said.
In total, the woman said she saw three tents flying the Confederate flag, including one tent that also sold a range of merchandise displaying the flag, such as T-shirts and blankets. And she saw the “Black Flies Matter” T-shirt, which she said was presented prominently and drawing a lot of attention from passersby.
She called the fair office that day to express her concerns, and was told by a person on the phone that the fair could talk to the vendors and try to get the flags removed, she said. But the next day, when she showed up with her husband and both children, she found that the items remained in place.
That’s when the woman took the photograph, and made plans to share it with activists, she said.
Within hours, the post began gaining traction. Visitors to the page left comments announcing that they had called the office number and urging others to do the same.
Meanwhile, critical posts on Cheshire Fair’s own Facebook page began pouring in. Some called the organizers “tolerant of open bigotry and hatred”; others raised concerns about explaining the flags to their children and vowed not to bring their families this year.
By Wednesday night, the Black Lives Matter NH’s post containing the photos had been shared 241 times, including by some state politicians, activist organizations and Democratic party pages — including Hanover Democrats — across the state.
For the organizers of Black Lives Matter NH, the online response was gratifying. The New Hampshire chapter is small, comprising four long-term staff members and about 100 active volunteers, and sometimes is overlooked in a state that is overwhelmingly white.
“We’re super grateful for the community really pulling together for this,” the organization’s spokeswoman said. “I’ve never seen this happen among racial justice in New Hampshire before, so I’m kind of shocked.”
She said the organization has received complaints of sightings of Confederate flags at other New Hampshire fairs and plans to oppose any displays at those fairs.
But some commenters on the Black Lives Matter NH post said that the concerns were overblown, arguing that the items are not explicitly racist and that those opposed could choose not to give the vendors their service.
Defenders of the Confederate flag often tout its position as an emblem of Southern heritage whose origins are rooted more in regional pride than slavery. But many historians dispute this interpretation, and evidence suggests the flag was disused after the Civil War, resurfacing only in the mid 20th-century in response to desegregation efforts during the Civil Rights Movement, according to a 2017 study in the Du Bois Review.
Other commenters said the items should be allowed as expressions of free speech. Addressing that argument, the Black Lives Matter NH spokeswoman, a person of color herself, pushed back.
“A lot of times people call it free speech, and people have a right to their opinions and their beliefs,” she said. “That’s true. But to me, when you start to question someone’s humanity, that’s not really opinion, that’s oppression.”