According to Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh in They All Played Ragtime, the cakewalk originated in the Antebellum period among slaves wishing to mock the high strutting ways of their masters. On Sundays, these slaves would dress up in their best clothes and do a high-kicking dance which attracted the attention of the master and his family, who never caught on that they were the brunt of this joke. The masters arranged for competitions among the slaves to see who could do the best strut. The winner was awarded a cake, and hence the cakewalk was born. After the war, many ex-slaves made their living as performers, and many of these performed the cakewalk and other plantation dances. The cakewalk ultimately became an international craze around the turn of the century. It also became popular at the University of Vermont (UVM) where white fraternity brothers in black-face would perform the cakewalk as part of a winter festival. And so the dance intended to alleviate black rage by mocking slave owners became a dance making fun of black people. The cakewalk festival was finally abandoned at UVM in the fall of 1969 under pressure from the NAACP. The fraternities which had been training dancers for the 1970 winter cakewalk competition, however, refused to give it up. Some of them organized a cakewalk demonstration on Redstone Campus one night. The demonstration came to an abrupt halt when African Americans bravely stood in the path of the dancers. The dance has since disappeared entirely from UVM. Long may it rest in peace.