AMHERST — A new exhibition at Frost Library at Amherst College celebrates Black and Indigenous families who lived and worked in Amherst.
“This exhibition, the first partnership between the Ancestral Bridges Foundation and Amherst College, seeks to center this long-neglected aspect of town history and to reveal the rich and complex lives of the Black and Afro-Indigenous community of Amherst,” said Anika M. Lopes, founder and executive director of Ancestral Bridges and a sixth-generation African American resident of Amherst. “Our families’ old black-and-white photographs complement oral histories — some yet to be recorded — and other artifacts available locally and at the college. I hope these images and stories raise questions, prompt further research and challenge us all to meet our collective responsibility to build a more just and equitable future.”
Streets like Blue Hills Road in Amherst were deed restricted to prevent Jews and Blacks from living there.
At one time restrictive covenants in real property deeds were common, prohibiting sale of the restricted property to persons of color, Jews or both. The Massachusetts legislature enacted legislation declaring such covenants void.
“In the early 1980s, my wife and I were friends with two UMass professors who were an interracial couple (husband was African American, wife was white). The husband told me that they had moved to Amherst in the late 1950s but were frustrated in seeking to buy a house of their choice because at that time there were still restricted neighborhoods in Amherst where neither people of color nor Jews were allowed to live,” said Michael Pill, a member of the board of Ancestral Bridges Foundation.
In addition, there was slavery in the Pioneer Valley for more than 150 years until the end of the 18th century, documented in the book by Robert H. Romer, “Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts.”
Pill once asked Lopes’ mother, Dorothy Bridges, why the men who volunteered as “colored troops” in the segregated Union Army would put their lives on the line to fight for a nation that enslaved them. “She looked me in the eye and answered, ‘Freedom, for themselves and their families.’ They now stare at us from old photographs, asking in the words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address what we today are doing to help make sure ‘these dead shall not have died in vain,’” he said.
Lopes’ ancestors, generations of Black and Afro-Indigenous residents of Amherst, lived in the historically Black, west-end neighborhood around Hazel Avenue, on only one side of the train tracks. Some worked at Amherst College, serving meals on dishes that depicted Lord Jeffery Amherst shooting at Native Americans, while they mentored and befriended students.
“They started businesses and churches, they provided homes to Black people newly arrived from the South, they performed jazz music internationally, and they were denied scholarships, jobs and opportunities due to systemic racism,” she said.
“Celebrating Black and Afro-Indigenous Families who Lived and Worked in Amherst in the 18th through Early 20th Centuries” is on view through the summer at Frost Library at Amherst College. Admission is free.
“It is a great opportunity to celebrate Black and Afro-Indigenous families who lived in Amherst and to learn more about the connection between Amherst College and the town,” said Sarah Barr, advisor to the provost on campus initiatives and director of community engagement at Amherst College.
For more information, go to https://www.amherst.edu/news/events/calendar/node/873249.
