By Kolby LaMarche

Late February 1957, snow covered the University of Vermont campus, as it does, and students prepared for the annual winter festival called Kake Walk. 

Leroy Williams Jr., a 21-year-old senior from Montclair, New Jersey, was in the spotlight. As captain of the UVM football team, he had earned respect as a strong offensive lineman and a first-team all-Yankee Conference selection despite the team’s challenging seasons.

Williams was one of only a handful of Black students at UVM. He had invited his girlfriend, Joyce Austin, also from Montclair, to visit for the weekend’s events. 

Williams and two friends arranged rooms at the Rest Haven Motel on Williston Road for their dates. The group included white women who checked in first on Friday night and received keys without any problem. When Williams brought Joyce Austin to the motel on Saturday morning, the manager refused her a room. He told the couple the motel did not accept “colored people.”

The denial hit Williams hard. The Burlington Free Press published a brief article, placing it between comic strips. The student newspaper, the Vermont Cynic, gave it a bit more attention. 

Word of the news spread quickly across campus. By early March, close to 400 students gathered for a rally to protest the discrimination. Community members responded too. Williams received more than 50 letters from Vermonters offering their homes as places for him, Austin, or others to stay if needed.

This was not the first time racial issues surfaced at UVM. The Kake Walk tradition, dating back to 1893, featured fraternity members performing a two-man dance in satin tails and blackface—a practice rooted in minstrel shows from the plantation era. 

In 1954, Williams and Dennis’s fraternity, Phi Sigma Delta, decided against blackface for their performance because of their membership. 

Vermont law in 1957 allowed private businesses like motels to refuse service based on race. 

The state attorney general noted that such discrimination contradicted common law principles, but no firm enforcement mechanism existed. The Rest Haven refusal brought the issue into the open. 

Student outrage and media coverage created pressure. Just two months later, in May 1957, the Vermont General Assembly passed a bill banning discrimination in public accommodations. 

It covered hotels, motels, restaurants, and similar places. Historians view the Williams incident as a primary driver behind the law—one of the earlier state measures of its kind, well before the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Williams and Joyce Austin went on to marry. She became his wife after being his high school sweetheart. 

In later reflections, Williams described the campus as generally welcoming, but the motel episode remained a clear example of direct discrimination. He did not face widespread hostility, he said, yet the refusal showed that progress had limits even in a northern state that saw itself as progressive.

The annual Kake Walk at UVM ended in 1969, following years of civil right-related dialogue and violence across the country, including the assistantion of Martin Luther King Jr. Champlain Elementary School, in the City’s South End, long held a “cake walk” for students, before its erasure in 2013, shortly after the election of former President Obama.