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Students at a small Pennsylvania college are demanding the school rename its Lynch Memorial Hall because they say the name has offensive, racist connotations.
Unsurprisingly, Lebanon Valley College didn’t actually name a building after the practice of lynching. Instead, Lynch Hall is named after former president Clyde Lynch, who guided the small Methodist school through the Great Depression and World War II. Lynch also helped raise $500,000 which was used to build the building now named in his honor. There are no known connections between Lynch and the practice of lynching, other than the words being the same.
Use of the word “lynch” to refer to extrajudicial punishments dates to the 1700s, when the American revolutionary Charles Lynch imprisoned British loyalists without any legal authority to do so.
But students say association is problematic enough, even if it’s purely incidental, and during a Friday meeting on the topic of racial justice a group of students called for the hall’s name to change.
The group also suggestes instead of changing the name the school could put Lynch’s full name on the hall (instead of just his last name) in order to avoid confusing people into thinking the building commemorates lynch mobs.
Along with renaming the building, the students had a set of demands similar to those presented at other colleges, such as creating more diversity workshops and requiring staff to undergo increased sensitivity training.
The school hasn’t yet decided how to respond to the protesters’ demands, and says it will make a final determination in January.
It is unclear how the protesting students feel about the name of America’s current attorney general.
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