Six on History: New York

[panaritisp]

Welcome back to Six on History  

If you like what you find on the "Six on History" blog, please share w/your contacts. 

Here is the link to join: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/six-on-history

And please don't forget to check out the pertinent images attached to every post

Go to the Six on History Archive to search past posts/articles click "labels" on the left when there and the topics will collapse.

Click here for Detailed Search Help  h/t John Elfrank

Thanks 

Phil Panaritis

Six on History: New York

1) 13 Historic Houses Converted into Museums in Manhattan - Untapped New         York

"New York City is home to numerous world-famous museums but if you need a break from classics like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the MOMA, do check out some of the City’s smaller, off the beaten path museums. In the previous installment of this series, we rounded up unique house museums in the Bronx. Today, we look at some gems in Manhattan."

13 Historic Houses Converted into Museums in Manhattan - Untapped New York

For an alternative to the main NYC museums, check out these historic houses converted into museums in Manhattan,...

2) How Bud Fowler's Hall of Fame baseball career was ruined after racist            revolt in Binghamton, Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin

"The following is excerpted from the book "That Happened Here?" by Gerald R. Smith and George Basler, published by the Broome County Historical Society. Copies available at the society’s office in the Broome County Library.

Binghamton’s baseball history is long and colorful, and Bud Fowler, just elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, is part of that history.

Fort Plain native Bud Fowler among 6 players elected to baseball Hall of...

Bud Fowler spent his childhood in Cooperstown before joining his first professional baseball team when he was 14...

Fowler came here in 1887 to play for the Binghamton Bingos in the International League, then considered one of the top minor leagues in the country. Playing second base, his best-known position, he established himself as a star. By the end of June he was hitting .350, with 42 runs scored, and was acknowledged as the best player on the team. But he was gone only a few days later, after playing only 34 games, when nine white players staged a revolt by signing a letter stating that they would no longer play with a black man. It was not a proud moment in Binghamton sports history.

Nor was 1887 a proud moment for baseball as a whole. On July 14, two weeks after Fowler’s release in Binghamton, International League club owners — stung by complaints from white players and press comments that it was becoming a “colored league” — voted to approve no more contracts with African-American players. The American Association and National League, two major leagues, followed suit shortly thereafter. The “color line” would last until 1946 when Jackie Robinson began playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers organization."

How Bud Fowler's Hall of Fame baseball career was ruined after racist revolt in Binghamton

In the book That Happened Here, George Basler explores how a 19th century baseball phenom was forced from his Bi...

3) The Young Lords - A Radical History, RT 

 

"On the show, Chris Hedges discusses the legacy of the radical group the Young Lords with Professor Johanna Fernández. In Chicago in 1969 a former gang leader, Cha Cha Jiménez, founded the revolutionary group The Young Lords to fight police brutality, racism, and gentrification. The Young Lords, with their signature purple berets and paramilitary formations, were to Mexican and Puerto Rican youth what the Black Panthers were to radicalized Blacks. The Young Lords quickly spread to New York. But in New York the leaders, while mostly the children of poor Puerto Rican immigrants, were also often better educated. The New York chapter, bilingual and bicultural, soon gave their generation the language to understand the discrimination, displacement and structural racism that plagued their families and their communities. As children they had to serve as interlocutors between their parents, who often did not speak English, and a callous and indifferent bureaucracy, forcing them to see their parents humiliated and often abused. The group was racially diverse---more than 25 percent of the members were Black---and celebrated the unique fusion of cultures that produced, for example, the Spanglish poetry of the Nuyorican Poets Café. The Young Lords drew their inspiration from the liberation movements in Cuba and Vietnam. They were at the forefront of the Rainbow Coalition of black, Latinx, Native, and white working-class radicals embodied in the organizing work of the Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, who was drugged and then assassinated by the Chicago police and the FBI. They Young Lords occupied churches and hospitals to protest the lack of adequate social services and health care, including the severe shortage of doctors in their neighborhoods and the widespread lead poisoning that afflicted poor children. They piled up garbage in the streets and lit the piles on fire to protest the failure by the New York’s sanitation department to provide service to poor neighborhoods. They at once built community campaigns and a revolutionary party, one of the very few waves of radical socialists in the United States led by people of color. The Young Lords, part of the New Left of the 1960s, fundamentally altered the relationships between people of color and the white majority. Their militancy forced city governments and the wider society to acknowledge and respect their most basic civil rights. Johanna Fernández is a professor of history at Baruch College of the City of New York, and author of The Young Lords: A Radical History. " #QuestionMore #RTAmerica #ChrisHedges #OnContact #YoungLords #PuertoRico #DomesticAffairs

RT is funded in whole or in part by the Russian government. 

Wikipedia 

The Young Lords - A Radical History

4) Actors Rita Moreno and George Chakiris remember the original 'West 

    Side Story', NPR Podcast 20 min.

"DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

Now we're going to hear an excerpt of our 2001 interview with Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for her performance as Anita. She was one of the few actors playing a Puerto Rican who was actually from Puerto Rico.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

RITA MORENO: The reason was that there simply weren't enough Hispanic - forget Puerto Rican - Hispanic male and female dancers at the time who could do the kind of professional job that was needed for Jerome Robbins' choreography, which is, you might have noticed, extremely complex and very difficult. There just weren't any. The reason there weren't any, I am surmising, Is that a lot of Latin kids - Latino kids in those days didn't have the money to take those kind of classes. They were a lot like in a way like the street dancers years later, the kids who danced on their backs and all that kind of stuff, who had talent but didn't have the training. So as a result, the Sharks - gosh, there were just a few of us, really, who were truly Latino who were able to get the part.

TERRY GROSS: Did you have to do anything to look more, act more or sound more Puerto Rican?

MORENO: They made me use an accent, which I wasn't thrilled about because a lot of us obviously don't have them. The thing that really bothered me the most is that they put the same very muddy, dark-colored makeup on every Shark girl and boy. And that really made me very upset. And I tried to get that changed. And I said, look at us. We're all, you know, many, many different colors. Some of us are very white. Some of us are olive-skinned. Some of us actually have Black blood. Some of us are Taino Indian, which is the original Puerto Rican. And nobody paid attention, and that was that. I had no choice in the matter. But I was not happy. And when I saw the film recently and saw George Chakiris, this beautiful guy, Greek guy (laughter) who looked like he had fallen into a bucket of mud, I just started - I started to giggle.

   ... "

Actors Rita Moreno and George Chakiris remember the original 'West Side Story'

5) The 19th Century Uproar in Fort Greene: Successful Black Hotelier Hiram      S. Thomas Buys a Home, brownstoner.com

"Fort Greene Place, between Hanson Place and Lafayette Avenue, is a quiet block, somewhat isolated from the busier hubbub of the nearby Fulton Street commercial corridor. Its handsome brownstone row houses were built as speculative housing in the 1850s for the large number of middle class buyers who were pouring into Brooklyn right before the Civil War. At the time, Fort Greene was one of the fastest growing Brooklyn neighborhoods, as development spread south and east from Brooklyn’s economic and residential heart, the Brooklyn Heights/Fulton Ferry and waterfront areas.

By the 1890s, the hot areas of town had shifted to Clinton Hill, Bedford and Park Slope, and Fort Greene Place was settling down in comfortable, if unremarkable, solid middle class bliss. Until the unthinkable happened in 1894, when a house sale catapulted Fort Greene Place onto the front page of the Brooklyn Eagle and in the New York Times. It was a time to call the neighborhood to action, hold meetings and mobilize, because Hiram S. Thomas, the new owner of 131 Fort Greene Place, was a Negro.

Brooklyn has always had black people in sizable numbers. From the slaves on Dutch farms to the freedmen who established businesses throughout the city, to the thousands who lived and worked all over Brooklyn with a range of incomes and levels of opportunity, by the late 1800s, there was already a 200-year-old history of black life in Brooklyn.

By any definition, Hiram S. Thomas was an unqualified success. He had been born a free man in Drummondville, Ontario, in 1837. He was a college graduate, and during the Ulysses S. Grant administration, in the 1870s, he was the steward of the Capitol Club, in Washington, D.C. By the 1880s, he had relocated to the popular and prosperous town of Saratoga Springs, one of the posh resort towns in the Adirondack Mountains, a favorite vacation destination of the rich and well-connected of New York City during the Gilded Age. Thomas began as the head waiter at the exclusive Grand Union Hotel, the Waldorf of Saratoga Springs. There he did quite well, and in 1888 he took over another well known hotel and restaurant on Saratoga Lake called Moon’s, and renamed it the Lake House. According to local records, the Saratoga Springs hotel belonged to a New York City owner, but the popular restaurant was all his.

The Lake House catered to a high end clientele, hosting parties, special events, as well as daily meals, and Thomas’ ownership of this venue was a coup for anyone. The Lake House was often in the society columns of the New York Times with Hiram Walker’s name as proprietor. The fact that it belonged to a black man who was respected by his customers was extraordinary for its time. The Lake House is also claimed to be the home to one of America’s national treasures, the Saratoga chip, or as we know it now the potato chip. Local legend has it that it was invented by the African-American chef when the hotel was still called Moon’s, who responded to a customer’s complaint that his thick fried potatoes were too thick. The chef, George Crum, cut them thinner twice, they were still returned, and in frustration, cut them paper thin, fried them again and over-salted them before sending them out. They were a hit, and were soon ordered by everyone at every meal, and a classic was born. Whether true or not, the potato chip was certainly popularized in Saratoga Springs.

But I digress. Saratoga Springs was a seasonal town, so in the winter, Hiram Thomas was busy as the head waiter at the Lakewood Hotel, in Lakewood, N.J. In 1892, a New York Times writer vacationing there wrote, “Who should be the headwater, but the dignified and portly Hiram Thomas, from the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, who has ‘head-waitered’ upon me many times in that establishment; and Mr. Thomas stood by me while I ate the Lakewood’s Little Neck clams…..It is no small honor, you must understand, to have the dignified head waiter in a big hotel devote his time to you and even stop to talk with you. But I wore my laurels as modestly as I could.”

Obviously, Mr. Thomas was a well respected man, and quite chatty. In 1894, while talking with guests at his Lake House restaurant in Saratoga Springs, Hiram Thomas ran into General Edward Molineaux, once a member of General Grant’s staff, and a customer from Thomas’ days in D.C. Upon hearing that the general was from Brooklyn, Thomas asked him about a property that he had just contracted to buy, on a little street called Fort Greene Place. To his great surprise, General Molineaux lived on that very block, down the street at No. 117. What a coincidence! Well, the General told his sister, who told her husband, who told his landlady, Doctor Emma Onderdock. She owned several buildings in the neighborhood and on that block, including the house next door to Mr. Thomas’ new building.

The good doctor, who had the distinction of being one of Brooklyn’s first female doctors, was the main instigator of the furor that followed. She immediately tried to sue the seller, a Dr. Harry Smith, who had moved to Prospect Heights, and really didn’t care who bought it. He had put the house in the hands of an agent named Thomas J. Henderson, who sold the house to Mr. Walker. Dr. Onderdock got the neighbors all agitated at the thought of a Negro buying a house on their block, and a series of meetings and strategy sessions, as well as media coverage, ensued. The headline in the Eagle on October 1, 1894 read, “Flurry in Ft. Greene Place, Because a Negro Has Bought a Three Story House: Aristocratic Neighbors in a Panic.” The New York Times headline read, “They Want No Colored Neighbor.”

It turns out the general, who was in Saratoga Springs for an extended time to take in the waters, tried to buy Hiram Thomas out, before the ink on his deed was dry, and Thomas said he would sell, but at a much higher price than what he had just bought the house for. That was not well received by the neighbors back on Fort Greene Place. Dr. Onderdock is quoted as saying, “If he [Thomas] is a respectable good man, as they say, he will not wish to live there after this trouble. If he does move in values will all become depreciated and he will lose as much as anyone else.” She also went on to say that if they couldn’t stop Thomas from buying the house, he ought to at least have the decency to not reside at the property.

After the furor died down, many of the other neighbors and parties involved were more reasonable. Thomas J. Henderson, the real estate agent, is quoted by the Eagle as saying that he would not mind living next door to a Negro, in fact, would prefer one as a neighbor to some white people he could name, and that anyway, business was business. Other neighbors also said they had no problem with the sale.

The incident drew the ire of the Rev. S. B. Halliday, assistant pastor of Plymouth Church, who wrote a scathing letter to the New York Times. In part, he said, “I have supposed that the residents of Fort Greene Place were so eminently respectable that they could not have feared that their respectability could ever be called in question by the coming of half a dozen respectable families of color settling around them, much less by a single family. What a pretty story it is to get abroad over the country that a black man cannot move into a respectable neighborhood without stirring up a rebellion….I think our city is disgraced by the presence of such a spirit in its midst.”

Well, what happened? Hiram and Julia Thomas and their children never moved in. Although he told the Times that the family would move in within a month of purchase, they never did, and Thomas sold the house two months later. There was no reason given, and Hiram Thomas would pass away in 1907, a very prosperous and successful man.

The neighbors would disappear from history. J.S. Burnham, General Molineaux’s brother-in-law and one of the loudest opponents to Thomas’ purchase of the home, was the proprietor of a dry-goods firm called Journeay and Burnham. He was also Dr. Onderdock’s tenant. Was his opposition to a black neighbor his own indignation, or was he influenced by his landlady’s vociferous responses? We’ll never know. As for General Edward Molyneaux, who broke the news to Fort Greene Place, he was well known as a Civil War general and member of the Grant staff. Quite an illustrious neighbor for Fort Greene Place. But perhaps the good Dr. Onderdock and others should have been more worried about his family, rather than Hiram Thomas’. For General Molineaux’s son Roland would become one of the most infamous murderers in New York City history.

Incidentally, the house last sold for $1.915 million in 2011. Hiram Thomas should have held out a lot longer."

Related Stories

• The Home of Eubie and Marion Blake at 284-290 Stuyvesant Avenue
• The Inspiring Story of Weeksville, One of America’s First Free Black Communities
• Walkabout: Black Folks in 19th Century Brooklyn

Black History | Brooklyn History

Suzanne Spellen (aka Montrose Morris)

Read Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6 of this story. As long time readers of this blog

The 19th Century Uproar in Fort Greene: Successful Black Hotelier Hiram S. Thomas Buys a Home

.

Suzanne Spellen (aka Montrose Morris)

One neighbor got the block agitated and media coverage ensued.

6) Should Chief Daniel Nimham Be Honored or Erased?  IHARE

The State of American History Should Chief Daniel Nimham
Be Honored or Erased? 

December 13, 2021
by Peter Feinman
 

"Chief Daniel Nimham was the last grand Sachem of the Wappinger Confederacy. While Nimham and other Wappingers fought against the French in the French and Indian War, their lands [in what became] Putnam County [NY] were usurped by Adolph Philipse. In 1766, Nimham traveled to England to challenge these fraudulent land titles in the British courts.

 In 1774, the Stockbridge Indians—a community of Wappinger, Munsee and Mohicans living in Massachusetts—organized a militia or community defense an in solidarity with the American cause of independence. Capt. Daniel Nimham and his son Capt. Abraham [they were Christians], along with the rest of the Stockbridge Militia, served in every major campaign in the eastern theater of the Revolution.

By the summer f 1778, the Stockbridge Militia was stationed at an outpost near Fort Independence in the Bronx. This area—between British-occupied Manhattan and the main American forces in White Plains—was a no man’s land and the scene of constant skirmishes and ambushes from both sides. On August 31, 1778, Chief Nimham and the Stockbridge Militia were surrounded and killed by British Dragoons and Hessians under the command of Lt. Col. John Graves Simcoe [best known as an evil villain in the AMC series “Turn” and as a hero and founder in Toronto].   (From a DAR/SAR Brochure)

HONOR

Daniel Nimham has been honored. A cairn of boulders and plaque at Indian Field in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx near the site of Nimham’s death, honors him and his fellow warriors. In 1906, the Westchester Historical Society and the Mount Vernon Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution created this historical honor.

On August 31, 2021, there was a ceremony at the Nimham Monument (which I attended). The event was organized by the Col. Benjamin Tallmadge Bronx Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Albuquerque Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution, and the Knightsbridge Historical Society.

In the dedication of Seven Wappinger Stones, the following nations within the Confederacy were honored:

Wappingers (Wappingers Falls, Dutchess County)
Nochpeem (Carmel, Nimham Mountain, Putnam County)
Siwanoy (Bronx, Hunters Island)
Weckqueskee (Dobbs Ferry, Westchester County)
Sink Sink (Ossining, Westchester County)
Rechewani (Manhattan).

As you can see from the list, there is a mountain in Putnam County named after Nimham. It is near where the Nimham Mountain Singers hold an annual pow-wow in August for the public. The headquarters for the organization is located on Chief Nimham Drive in Carmel, NY.

By coincidence, I had alerted a colleague in Fishkill about the event in the Bronx. He arranged to have the municipality present at the event and to participate. They did so because Nimham had either had been born there or lived there. The municipality is arranging to dedicate an eight-foot tall bronze statue in his likeness probably in the spring, 2022. The statue will be located in the hamlet of Wiccopee, in East Fishkill, named after a Wappinger sub-tribe.

So there are multiple ways in which Chief Daniel Nimham has been honored. But would you name a school after him and have him as your school mascot?

ERASE

At the same time Nimham has been honored and in the same area of the Wappinger Confederacy, there also has been an ongoing effort to erase the Indian presence from school mascots. True the examples of the dispute are not for Nimham himself or either for the Wappingers. It is not my intention here to chronicle chapter-and-verse the various community fights over the maintenance or removal of Indian mascots particularly as they relate to high school football teams and other sports. These include:

Cross River John Jay High School Indians: changed
Mahopac Indians
Nyack Indians: changed
Wappinger Roy C. Ketcham Indians.

A student petition says:

The Roy C Ketcham High School and Wappingers Junior High School both have the mascot the Wappinger Indians. A human being should not be a mascot. This is offensive and damaging to students and community members who are Indigenous people.

This is an example of teenage idealism at its purest. However, an adult version of these sentiments has been proposed as well in the state legislature that would ban New York schools from using Indian names, logos, and mascots beginning in 2024.

Dr. Ian Record of the National Congress of American Indians said in July, 2021:

The use of Native American sports mascots, logos or symbols perpetuates stereotypes of American Indians that are harmful. The “warrior savage” myth has plagued this country’s relationship with the Indian people as it reinforces the racist view that Indians are uncivilized and uneducated.

Heather Bruegel, a historian and cultural affairs director of the Stockbridge-Munsee community now based in Wisconsin said the people were not honored by names such as “Chiefs,” “Warriors,” and “Braves” which are offensive. She would prefer that the history would be taught accurately in the schools.

The Stockbridge Indians are aware of the honoring of Chief Nimham for his actions as a presumably brave warrior. To the best of my knowledge they have launched no campaign to topple the monument and markers to Nimham and his fellow warriors in the Bronx and Putnam nor to the statue to him being planned for the spring.

It seems that words like “warrior,” chiefs,” and “braves” only apply to Indians and to no other peoples. Apparently Achilles was not a warrior. It remains to be seen what would happen if a school or sports team kept the warrior name and changed the mascot. Klingons anyone?

One suggestion made in the discussion was that Nyack Indians become the Nyack Lenape after the people who lived there.  That suggestion failed. The dominant decision is the best Indian is an erased Indian.

Consider for example, the Tappan Zee Bridge. It famously combines the Dutch and Tappan Indian heritages in its name – the name of a people and the Dutch word for “sea” at this wide point in the Hudson River. However the mascot of the Tappan Zee High School recognizes the Dutch heritage but ignores the Tappan. They have been erased.

The Village of Ossining, named after one of the people part of the Wappinger Confederacy, is debating removing the Indian profile from its seal. It already changed the nick name of the high school from Indians. While the erasure of the Indian heritage is not complete in the village, one can anticipate that it will occur.

Most likely the same fate awaits the Lenape, the Stockbridge Indians, and the Wappinger Confederacy wherever the name changes have occurred. The purification process leaves no trace behind. Perhaps Sing Sing, Wappingers, Wiccopee, Tappan, and Katonah will have to change their names as well when the next generation of idealistic teenagers finds a cause.

HONORING INDIANS

The Chicago Black Hawks are a hockey team named after an individual named “Black Hawk.” According to a team statement:

The Chicago Blackhawks' name and logo symbolizes an important and historic person, Black Hawk of Illinois' Sac & Fox Nation, whose leadership and life has inspired generations of Native Americans, veterans and the public.

We celebrate Black Hawk's legacy by offering ongoing reverent examples of Native American culture, traditions and contributions, providing a platform for genuine dialogue with local and national Native American groups. As the team's popularity grew over the past decade, so did that platform and our work with these important organizations.

 Needless-to-say the team is under pressure to change the name and mascot.

The Spokane Indians, a minor league baseball team, has a similar experience to the Chicago Black Hawks except it is named after a people and not an individual. At one time, the Indian mascot had nothing to do with the actual Spokane Indians located approximately 40 miles away. Now there are regular meetings between the tribe and the team. The mascot has been changed to a trout for a traditional food source of the people. The name on the team uniform is in Salish the language of the Spo-ka-NEE. Exhibits of the culture and history of the people have been placed in the stadium. An advertisement on the scoreboard depicts a traditional Spokane tribe person in headdress. And the nickname of the high school on the Spokane reservation is “Redskins” which does not seem to bother the people there. Obviously both the team and the people are in major need of cleansing and purification to meet Woke standards.

A reporter spoke to the chairwoman of the Spokane Tribal Business Council, Carol Evans:

…she expressed great pride in the partnership and emphasized the fundamental difference between the Spokane Indians baseball club and other teams. “We are not their mascot,” she said. “They’re named after our tribe.”

The Florida State University provides another example of a win-win solution. From its website:

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, FSU’s campus became a learning ground with regard to the Florida Seminole Indians. Several key people were directly responsible for the new awareness. Joyotpaul “Joy” Chaudhuri, an American Indian expert and FSU professor of political science, and his wife, Jean, an American Indian activist, came to the university during this period. They helped establish an American Indian Fellowship at FSU. This influential group led the campus and the community toward a better understanding of Native Americans in general and the Florida Seminoles in particular. The group was instrumental in mediating between the university and the Florida Seminole Indians. There were several meetings between the two, and problems were addressed to the satisfaction of both. As a result, FSU retired certain images that were offensive to the tribe, and began consulting with the tribe regularly on all such matters.

 By the late 1970s, FSU’s campus, like the rest of country, had become more educated about Indians in general and the Florida Seminoles in particular. Along with this new understanding came major changes in the university’s mascots. It became very important to portray the university’s namesake with dignity and honor, and to do it with the graces of the Florida Seminole tribe. This attitude culminated in a mutual respect between the two institutions, and further tied their futures to one another.

 Osceola and Renegade

 In 1978, FSU embarked upon a new tradition — one that had the full endorsement of the Seminole Tribe of Florida. A Seminole warrior riding a horse, to become known as Osceola and Renegade, was introduced at FSU home football games, and soon became one of the most enduring and beloved symbols of the university.

 For more than 30 years, FSU has worked closely with the Seminole Tribe of Florida to ensure the dignity and propriety of the various Seminole symbols used by the university. The university’s goal is to be a model community that treats all cultures with dignity while celebrating diversity.

A recent article provided these quotations:

“Florida State University’s official use of the Seminole name is different from other names in that it does not perpetuate offensive racial stereotypes nor is it meant to diminish or trivialize any Native American or indigenous peoples. Instead, it is used with explicit tribal permission and involvement to honor and promote the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s unconquered history and spirit that persists to this day,” Elizabeth Hirst, FSU’s chief of staff and liaison to the Seminole Tribe, told the Tampa Bay Times in 2020.

 Ask the Seminole Tribe, and they’ll tell you similarly.

 “The Tribe views the relationship as a multi-dimensional collaboration that provides meaningful educational opportunities and other positive outcomes,” tribe spokesman Gary Bitner told The Times.

 One would think that the same such partnerships could be created elsewhere even at the high school level. The fact that such partnerships are never even considered is a sign of how the dialog has degenerated.

 INDIANS AND INDIAN MASCOTS

During all these confrontations over Indian logos, they remain quite common for Indian organizations and colleges.

Two observations come to mind here. One big difference between Americans and Indians in logos relates to individuals. Americans love individual symbols. Think of Uncle Sam and Liberty as symbols of the country as examples. Even our nation’s capital is named after an individual. By contrast the Indian logos seem more symbolic or metaphorical. I suspect there is a real cultural difference here. That is why in the land of Daniel Nimham a school can be named after fellow American Revolution hero John Jay but not after Nimham.

Second, all these Indian organizations are still named “Indians.” By contrast when Negroes became African American, all Negro organizations were obligated to change their names accordingly. Apparently white people have yet to be as successful in getting Indians to abandon their names and become “Indigenous.” Dr. Ian Record of the National Congress of American Indians used the term “Indians” three times in two sentences (above). On the other hand as the student petition suggests (above), idealized (white) teenagers have now been educated to never use the word “Indian.”

INDIAN CITIZENSHIP ACT OF 1924 CENTENNIAL

In a previous blog (What Are You Doing for the Indian Citizenship Act (1924) Centennial?), I suggested that the Indian Citizen Act centennial provided a convenient opportunity to discuss the ongoing problems related to the place of Indian Nations and Indian individuals in America. Lord knows, there is plenty to discuss.

As I read the plethora of news articles from my local paper about mascots, I realize that such discussions are a farfetched pipedream. There can be no “come-let-us-reason-together” in a moral cultural war. There can be no healing in zero-sum confrontations. The stories of Daniel Nimham, Chief Katonah, and the Wappinger Confederacy provide an excellent example of the potential opportunity to begin such a dialog. The absence of his name from the mascot discussions which have been held so far reveal that there is no chance of such healing discussions even being started yet alone succeeding.

 

BREAKING NEWS! BREAKING NEWS!

This just in. This just in. The Quakers have demanded that Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua (NY) and the University of Pennsylvania change their mascots and nicknames immediately under penalty of eternal damnation."

Posted in State of New York State History

Tags: Chicago Blackhawks, Daniel Nimham, DAR, Florida State Seminoles, Heather Bruegel, INDIAN CITIZENSHIP ACT OF 1924, National Congress of American Indians, Spokane Indians, Wappinger"