Public Comment: Personal Testimony On Growing Up Black In Amherst

The following public comment was made at the meeting of the Amherst Town Council, March 7, 2022.Chair of the African Heritage Reparations Assembly Michele Miller sought to add a personal perspective to the Town Council December 7, 2020 Resolution to End Structural Racism by presenting personal narratives on the effect of racism on Amherst’s residents of color. Hala Lord, Alexis Reed, and Amilcar Shabazz read statements at the March 7 meeting.)

Michele Miller’s Introduction
|I want to start by sharing my deep gratitude to the members of the African Heritage Reparation Assembly — Heather Hala Lord, Yvonne Mendez, Alexis Reed, Irv Rhodes, and Amilcar Shabazz — for their commitment to bringing about repair and healing in our community, and for holding a vision of a more equitable and just Amherst. I also want to thank our staff liaison, Jennifer Moyston, who wears so many hats and is so generous with her time and her wisdom. Working with this group for the past six months (and some members longer) has been one of the most humbling and rewarding experiences of my life. I am grateful every minute for the opportunity I’ve been given, and the trust my AHRA colleagues have put in me. 

As a preamble to the presentation on the memo in your packet, we wanted to bring forward the resolution signed by our Town Council President, Lynn Griesemer, on December 7, 2020,  “A Resolution Affirming the Town of Amherst’s Commitment to End Structural Racism and Achieve Racial Equity for Black Residents.” To remind us what the town has committed to and, more importantly, to breathe life into the resolution by hearing the voices of residents with direct experience living in Amherst as an African heritage person. I’m going to call on the three members who are with us tonight to reflect on one of the “whereas” statements in the resolution.

We hope to engage Councilors in reading the “be it further resolved” sections at a future presentation. 

Testimony From Alexis Reed
WHEREAS, the Amherst Town Council acknowledges the trauma inflicted on Blacks by persistent white supremacist ideology results in psychological harm affecting educational, economic, health, and social outcomes and conjures painful memories of our Town’s past not only for those who lived through these experiences, but also for the generations that have followed; 

My family first arrived in Amherst when my uncle, Arthur Wilkins, was accepted into Amherst College in 1968.

He would graduate with the class of 1972 as my other uncle, my mother, and my grandparents moved into Puffton Village, and then shortly after into Townhouse of Amherst.

My grandfather, Jimm DeShields, worked as the Special Assistant to the Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts, who at the time was Bill Bromery. My grandmother, meanwhile, was getting her Ed.D. at the same institution, and my mother attended Mark’s Meadow.

By 1973, my grandmother, Shirley DeShields, was the acting Director of the Communications Skills Center at UMass.

In 1975, my family purchased our beloved family home on Hulst Road, built brand new by Larry Miller of DH Jones Real Estate. In the same year my uncle Michael graduated from Amherst Regional High School. My mother, then, attended Crocker Farm.

Fast forward to 1991 at Cooley Dickinson Hospital where I am brought into the world. At this point my grandmother is the director of the James Baldwin Scholars program at Hampshire College (where I would go on to study and graduate from in 2015). My mother moved us into Rolling Green, where I would find my first sense of community amongst the kids there. My uncle Michael, meanwhile, opened the first Black-owned barber shop of Amherst, named M.Y. Place.

In 2001, as I was attending school at Fort River in the building that used to be called “East Street,” my grandmother opened her own private therapy practice called Interventions. She serviced those with blended families, bi-racial youth, and needs for accessing gender-affirming surgeries, just to name a few.

I was raised with a strong sense of connectedness to community, as well as a need to share resources and power. I was raised in a family that had a lot of privileges compared to many of our peers, but there was always an importance placed on using those resources and privileges to uplift others.

With that being said, whose responsibility is it to uplift and support the diversity of our community? Is the onus on Black folks to do the work to “cure” white supremacy in our community? Who can speak to whose community? Who can reach them?

In my junior year of high school (roughly 2009) I took an African American literature class taught by a currently-employed, beloved and “progressive” white teacher. When the African American students (greatly outnumbered by our white peers) voiced our concerns over the N-Word being read aloud by our non-black classmates — that it was triggering and that censoring the word shouldn’t affect our ability to learn the content — our teacher suggested that we “take a vote” on whether or not the N-Word should be read in class.

This is who is shaping our youth. How many times did those in power ignore us when we told you Mr. Garney was being wildly inappropriate with us? How long will the testimonies of our community be reduced to a need to behave and assimilate? You, with the power to change it, must be critical of the power dynamic that we have forced Amherst youth to take part in.

Anti-blackness permeates every aspect of a black person’s life, starting from the moment they take their very first breath until the moment they take their last. We are talking about children that we raised in this system who we are failing. We are talking about children that we raise in this system that move through it and cannot afford to live in this town upon graduation, or have to find jobs outside of Amherst. I can only dream of owning property in the only town I’ve ever worked, lived, and gone to school in.

We are talking about how much police presence there is in Mill Valley or Colonial Village, a majority BIPOC and low-income community that I lived in for two years, and how rarely you see cops at places like Office Park Apartments. There are monuments we can build, songs we can sing, and proclamations we can shout at the top of mountain tops that won’t amount to anything tangible.

It’s realizing that Black PEOPLE were identified as “Blacks” four times in this document about systemic racism, but white people were not identified as “Whites” one single time. It’s getting to know ourselves and our biases in every single interaction we have. The work begins with us as individuals, knowing the roles we have and the weight we carry in our community. It’s listening to the community that has, for decades, felt so marginalized and pushed outside of the life that is so desirable for those that choose to move here.

I have been a part of this community my entire life. My mother has been a part of this community since she was a toddler. My family became a part of the community off of the heels of intense racial violence across the nation in the 1960s. Too many of them did not survive to speak their truths so I am here to report on their behalf that regardless of the titles, the degrees and the accolades, black folks — my family — are not pictured in the advertised image of Amherst, amongst the colonial-style homes and sprawling greenery. 

When you hear that over half of the Black population in Amherst lives below the poverty line, what do you feel compelled to do that is woven into the fabric of what you do every day? Because this is life for Amherst residents every single day. Sharing space without sharing power is tokenization. How will each of us leave here with an intent to share power in our community?