Read: What kids are really learning about slavery

As for the slavery passage, “we want it out completely,” says Tabitha Pohl-Moore, the acting director of the NAACP’s Vermont branch and the president of the Rutland-area chapter, arguing that opponents of removal are propagating the belief that “white folks think that they know better what we need than we do.”

The racial-equity measures function as a signal to Vermonters, advocates say, that bigotry is anathema to the state’s values. Cementing equal protection in the state constitution in particular gained a renewed urgency among lawmakers this past summer, when Kiah Morris, a two-term state representative from Bennington and the only black woman in the legislature, resigned following a torrent of racist harassment and threats from white supremacists, most notably another Bennington resident. (Morris could not be reached for comment.) The targeting of Morris was one of several incidents in the recent past that have shaken the state’s self-image. A year prior, the mayor of Rutland, the state’s third-largest city, lost reelection after his plan to resettle 100 Syrian and Iraqi refugees in the community drew public ire. Last summer, a diverse group of campers was targeted in at least three incidents of racist harassment in the resort town of Stowe.

“It’s time to recognize that there are groups that are discriminated against, whether implicitly or explicitly,” says state Senator Virginia Lyons, the lead sponsor of the equal-protection amendment. “Our society as a democracy will only last as long as these groups are supported.”

Taken together, the amendments pose complex questions for the state’s lawmakers: not only about what sort of place Vermont is, but also about which issues should be addressed in a state’s most important legal document.

The slavery provision is the least practically consequential of the amendments—removing the language would have no effect whatsoever on day-to-day legal proceedings in the state. Yet the issue is the most historically and ideologically fraught of all the amendments working their way toward the ballot. The amendment’s backers see Vermont as a place on the cutting edge of social equity, where the constitution changes with the times and yesterday’s radicalism is today’s foregone conclusion. The other faction sees the work of the past—the state’s abolition movement and groundbreaking legal codes that allowed men who did not hold property to vote—as the essential building block of today’s Green Mountain State. Vermonters in this camp believe that the abolition language needs to stay in the constitution—that when the history of Vermont’s radical past is not visible in the state’s law, something of its spirit may be lost.

When the earliest version of the state’s constitution was written, in July 1777, Vermont was an independent republic tenuously allied with the year-old United States. In the document, Vermont’s founders were attempting to portray themselves as learned, reasonable, and radical, says Gary Shattuck, a former assistant U.S. attorney and a historian who studies the state’s formation. Part of that radicalism was an action against slavery: Since the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, no country had banned the practice—and Vermont became the first to do so.