Prospector Pete At Cal State Long Beach Becomes PC Casualty

, Malcolm A. Kline, Leave a comment

One wonders if there’s a warehouse somewhere with old mascot costumes or whether they were all purged in a bonfire.

“Cal State Long Beach is sending Prospector Pete packing,” Hannah Fry reported in The Los Angeles Times on September 21, 2018. “The towering bronze statue that sits in the plaza outside the liberal arts building soon will be relocated to a less prominent place on campus as the university officially moves to retire the mascot that some say represents the state’s history of racism and genocide against Native Americans.”

“The university’s announcement Thursday comes on the heels of a decades-long debate over the suitability of the ’49ers’ image, which pays homage to the state’s gold rush, on a college campus that has increasingly welcomed a more culturally diverse student population in recent years.” Have the ’49ers been renamed yet?