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Naming a town after Amherst is like naming a day after Columbus
- Kenneth Miller
- Mar 16, 2016
- 2 min read
The UMass Amherst Minuteman in winter. He stands looking out over our pond. Patriotism and racism often get mixed up intertwined at American colleges. Photo from UMass website.
When I was a student at UMASS Amherst, the Maoist Internationalist Movement helped to organize Prison Awareness Week, led some cool reading groups, and distributed a t-shirt that read, “Naming a day after Columbus is like naming a town after Amherst.” Lord Jeffery Amherst, namesake of the town, the College, and the University, is famous for murdering Indians on the Allegheny River’s North Shore with smallpox infested blankets and then doing the same thing in Western Massachusetts where, in appreciation, they named a town after him. Indeed, naming a day after Columbus is a lot like naming a town after Amherst.
The New York Times reports that Amherst College is keeping its name because”it is named after the town, not the person,” but has finally dropped Jeffery Amherst as an “unofficial mascot;” they are also going to change the name of their hotel from the “Lord Jeffery Inn” to something less racist. Good thinking. Emily Dickinson lived nearby. Maybe they will name it for her.
The UMASS Amherst mascot is a Minuteman. Sometimes lauded in American History as patriotic revolutionaries, these Minute Men were really colonialist gangs that had been organized to exterminate Indians. We recognized how terrible the Minuteman mascot was in the late 90’s, and earlier, so I was unpleasantly surprised when I visited UMASS again in 2006 and saw a huge Minuteman statue erected next to the campus pond. While other universities, like Amherst College, are trying to clean up their symbols that are tinged with genocide and hate, I have no idea why UMASS is digging in with this huge ugly Minuteman statue next to our pond.
As an alumni of the UMASS Amherst and its Radical Student Union, I guess the answer is to change the name of the town.
Kenneth Miller attended the 18th Annual Summit Against Racism in Pittsburgh, PA.
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