The Southern Poverty Law Center found a current total of 1,503 Confederate-related symbols across the United States, including:
- 718 monuments and statues, nearly 300 of which are in Georgia, Virginia or North Carolina;
- 109 public schools named for Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, or other notable Confederates;
- 80 counties and cities named for Confederates;
- 9 official Confederate holidays in six states; and
- 10 U.S. military bases named for Confederates.
- Under increasingly intensive pressure, South Carolina led the way in 2015 by removing the Confederate flag from the State House grounds where it had hung since 1962. Other cities slowly and often reluctantly followed suit.
Those on the other side of the issue who demand to retain these monuments and symbols argue “tradition” since they are a part of their “heritage,” and they represent an era of American history.
These emblems and personalities do, in fact, represent an era of American history, an era of war over the right to continue the enslavement of human beings, one in which many Southerners believed they had the “God” given right to torture, work to death, separate families, rape, and otherwise abuse others for their own economic, social, and cultural benefit as well as physical pleasure.
Most certainly, these monuments and symbols represent “tradition,” but a tradition worth remembering only as shameful eras in our national story, and not to romanticize or admire.
These symbols inspire people to violence while for many others, they bring to the surface a legacy of oppression and pain.
The monuments and symbols empowered, for example, 21-year-old avowed white supremacist Dylann Roof who brutally and without any sign of remorse murdered nine African American parishioners at the historic Emanuel A.M.E. church on June 17, 2015. Roof was depicted in several online photos some in which he carried the Confederate battle flag in one hand and a gun in the other.
In addition, an estimated 1500 white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville, Virginia for their “Unite the Right” rally August 11-12, 2017, carrying Confederate flags, Nazi symbols, and other racist and antisemitic regalia in protest of the town’s proposal to remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The rally resulted in extreme violence and the murder of a young woman and the death of two state police officers.
Under the guise of preserving “tradition,” proponents of keeping Confederate symbolism fail to realize that most of the monuments were erected well after the Civil War toward the end of the 19th- and into the 20th-century. Southerners imposed these monuments primarily as a weapon of intimidation against black people in the Jim Crow South during what has come to know as the “Redemption Period.”
Controversy has been swirling as well around a long-overdue public debate whether to change the name of sports teams including the Washington Redskins football franchise.
On one side, some news outlets, like the San Francisco Chronicle announced in 2013 it will no longer use the word “Redskins” when referring to the team. Also in 2013, the Washington, D.C. City Council voted overwhelmingly to refer to the team’s name as “racist and derogatory.”
According to an October 16, 2013 Press Release by the American Indian Movement (AIM) Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul) calling for a protest at the game between the Minnesota Vikings and the Washington “Redskins”:
The continued use of American Indian likenesses and images by sports teams has resulted in widespread racial, cultural and spiritual stereotyping which promotes hatred and disrespect of American Indian people. Using American Indian slurs like ‘Redskins’ is no different than the use of Black Sambo which offended African Americans or the Frito Bandito which is offensive to the Hispanic community.
The press release went on to demand:
Retire the racist attire! Recognize that American Indians are a living people, not mascots for America’s fun and games!
While entire social movements have developed to redress the misdirected “honoring” of historic names, statues, flags, and other symbols on the national level, much work and organizing still needs to occur to redress grievances on the local level as well.
What follows offers a prime example.
The University of Massachusetts at Amherst
I truly love the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and I have ever since my first visit here in the early 1970s, through my residential doctoral program and the earning of my degree, and to this very day as I have returned as an educator in my semi-retirement.
I love the campus and most structures old and new, the bright, passionate, inquisitive students, the world-class faculty, the ahead-of-the-curve research, the demographic and intellectual diversity, and, of course, the duck-rich pond that quiets my soul each time I take respite by its gentle shores.
Though I declare unequivocal admiration for our institution, I am troubled, nonetheless, by some longstanding issues that I cannot seem to reconcile revolving on a name, symbols, and a motto.
“What’s in a name?” the Bard asked in his timeless classic “Romeo and Juliet.” “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Yes, and while this holds true for Romeo Montague and for roses, the town in which we find our great university could, in fact, find a much sweeter smelling namesake to honor!
The town took its name from Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the Commander-in-Chief of British forces between 1758 and 1763 during the French & Indian War. For Amherst’s victorious service in appropriating Canada for the British realm, King George III rewarded Amherst with 20,000 acres of confiscated Indian land in New York State.
Amherst’s brutal military methods against indigenous populations included callous germ warfare, tactics forever branded in the annals of shame and infamy.
For example, referring to an uprising against British forces led by Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa nation, who fought with the French, historian Carl Waldman wrote:
Captain Simeon Ecuyer had bought time by sending smallpox-infected blankets and handkerchiefs to the Indians surrounding the fort — an early example of biological warfare — which started an epidemic among them. Amherst himself had encouraged this tactic in a letter to Ecuyer.
In addition, Amherst, on another occasion in a letter to Colonel Henry Bouquet, wrote:
Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.
Amherst continued in a postscript to Bouquet in a letter dated July 16, 1763 referring to his Indian enemies: “…to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race.”
Amherst’s letters also discussed the use of dogs to hunt Indians, the so-called “Spaniard’s Method,” but, alas, he was not able to implement this plan due to a shortage of hounds.
On the other hand, though he opposed the French as well during the war, Sir Jeff had no apparent inhumane disregard for the French, but rather saw them as his “worthy” enemy. “It was the Indians who drove him mad. It was they against whom he was looking for ‘an occasion, to extirpate them root and branch’.”
How ironic that the great seal of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst profiles the image of an Indian. This so-called “honoring,” taking “pride” in, and “respecting” Native Americans by the cultural descendants of Lord Jeffrey Amherst and others who engaged in forced evacuations, deculturalization, and genocide of First Nations people strikes as hypocrisy at best.
Also, the brave Minutemen, members of that valiant colonial militia ready at a moment’s notice to fight the British before and during the Revolutionary War of Independence, served as the vanguard of our burgeoning nation.
While all due respect and honor need be granted to this early troop of citizen soldiers, I question whether the symbol of “Sam the Minuteman” as the university’s mascot and our sports team athletes, known as Minutemen and Minutewomen, as well as the motto on our university’s great seal, which reads Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem (“By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty”) are appropriate symbols and words to represent an institution of higher learning.
Both the Minuteman symbol and the motto seem better suited to the United States Department of Defense than to a great university.
A relatively new addition appeared on campus of a large statue of “Sam the Minuteman,” holding high his elongated-barreled musket on central campus.
Even before contemporary incidents of high profile gun-related violence have surfaced, I have long felt uneasy and have questioned the appropriateness of militiamen, guns, and “swords” serving as the literal and symbolic face of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I am uncomfortable with the messages these weapons send.
Within this current era of communities and institutions reexamining their mascots and mottoes and the ways in which they represent themselves to the larger society, we must continue to raise concerns and questions to a higher level of public inquiry.
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Photo credit: Pixabay