There Was no Pull

From VPR -

Why Is Vermont So Overwhelmingly White?
By ANGELA EVANCIE & REBECCA SANANES

“In terms of immediacy, there isn't an established community of color here in Vermont. And there is a historic reason for that,” says C. Winter Han, an associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College and the author of the book Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America. “Because clearly there were many places that at one time in history were not very diverse, like Chicago or New York or Philadelphia — there really was a time when those cities were almost uniformly white. And yet over time, for different reasons, for different groups, they became much more diverse.”

Professor Han says these transformations weren’t arbitrary.

“There is this pattern of migration that most places where people go, they go because there's already an established connection between the place that that is sending migrants and the place that is receiving them.

This theory of immigration is often referred to as “push and pull.” And if you take the long view of Vermont’s history, when it comes to a particular demographic — African-Americans — there was no "pull" to Vermont.

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