This week we honored Dr Martin Luther King Jr. In that context, we can remember the Black families who have lived in Amherst through the decades, and the Black soldiers from Amherst who fought in the Civil War. In 2013 the Amherst Historical Society hosted a lecture – ‘Black Soldiers, White Officers’ – given by Robert Romer, who wrote Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts (2009). In this lecture he tells a few of the stories of those families. Specifically, he focusses on the stories of a Black soldier, Charles Finnemore (1838 – 1920) and a White officer, Christopher Pennell (1842 – 1864), and uses them to indicate a wider story.
Please note that our annual Founder’s Day Meeting is scheduled for Saturday, February 12, at 2PM, and will be held over Zoom (link TBA).
And our Friday noon History Bites lecture series is starting up again on Friday, February 25. Our first lecture will be by Mr Blair Kamins, an Amherst college graduate who will talk about the early architecture at Amherst College.
The Zoom link for the lecture is https://us02web.zoom.us/j/