CONTROVERSY IN THE "QUIET CORNER": Eugene Volokh has some insightful things to say about a controversy in Norwich, CT (not far from whence I hail) over a school building named after John Mason, a seventeenth century founder of Norwich who led a brutal raid on a Pequot village. The raid culminated in the massacre of 400 men, women, and children. The local NAACP has asked the school board to change the name of the building to "Virginia Christian" to honor the city's first black City Council member. Christian was elected to the Council in 1965. Read the Norwich Bulletin story here. Read the blog that inspired Volokh's commentary here.

As Volokh argues, naming public buildings is an action of government; names are meant to express honor, esteem, gratitude, reverence, and memory. It seems to me that it's a good thing for there to be debate and discussion about those actions, even if the debate can make people uncomfortable.

An article from the Hartford Courant linked by the Bulletin indicates that the roots of this conflict lay in a 1994 dispute in Groton, CT, concerning the fate of a statue erected in the late nineteenth century in Mason's honor. One thing is clear: it's a heck of a lot easier to change the name on a building than to dispose of a 23-ton monument. It was eventually moved to Windsor, CT. The Bulletin doesn't mention any resistance to the request, but an article in The Day (New London) from today does. One school board member wrote a reply to the local NAACP claiming that a discussion of the name change would be a waste of time and that the NAACP was trying to "bully" the school board. Other folks in the town welcome the debate.

An important piece of background for the story is the meteoric rise of the Mashantucket Pequots, descendants to the people whom Mason tried to exterminate in the early seventeenth century. In the past two decades, the Pequots have built Foxwoods, one of the most profitable casinos in the world. Resurgent tribal power has helped to put the memorial issue on the map.