Boston’s City Council is expected to debate whether to hold a hearing on renaming Faneuil Hall, a popular tourist site that is named after a wealthy merchant who owned and traded slaves.
FILE - Visitors pass Faneuil Hall, April 5, 2022, in Boston. A Boston city councilor is expected to introduce a resolution Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2023, to hold a hearing on renaming Faneuil Hall, a popular tourist site which has ties to slavery.
In calling for the hearing, Councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson has filed a resolution decrying the building’s namesake, Peter Faneuil, as a “white supremacist, a slave trader, and a slave owner who contributed nothing recognizable to the ideal of democracy.”The downtown meeting house was built for the city by Faneuil in 1742 and was where Samuel Adams and other American colonists made some of the earliest speeches urging independence from Britain.
The Rev. John Gibbons, a minister at the Arlington Street Church, said in a statement that the goal is not to erase history with a name change but to correct the record. “He was a man who debased other human beings,” he said. “His name should not be honored in a building called the cradle of liberty.”, the City Council can hold a hearing on the name, but it doesn’t have the authority to actually rename Faneuil Hall.
Supporters wanted the commercial center renamed because Roxbury resident Thomas Dudley was a leading politician when Massachusetts legally sanctioned slavery in the 1600s.
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