Boston urged to rename hall tied to slavery

BOSTON — As U.S. cities grapple with what to do with Confederate statues, an advocacy group is calling for renaming Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall because its namesake had ties to the slave trade.

The brick meetinghouse, built in 1742 and nicknamed the “Cradle of Liberty,” was where Samuel Adams and other American colonists made speeches urging independence from Britain.

Decades later, Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists of the 1800s would use its famous stage to call for an end to slavery.

But Kevin Peterson, founder of the New Democracy Coalition, says it’s past time to change the hall’s name because it was built and donated to Boston by Peter Faneuil, a wealthy merchant who owned and traded slaves.

“It’s an embarrassment to this city to remain focusing on this place as a place of celebration and as a place of which we should have some civic pride with this name attached to it,” said Peterson.

He made the comments last week in front of Faneuil Hall. City leaders, including Mayor Marty Walsh, had gathered there to call for peace in the aftermath of the violent white nationalist protest in Charlottesville, Va., that left one counterprotester dead.

Peterson suggests renaming the hall in honor of Crispus Attucks, a man of black and Native American heritage who was considered the first martyr of the American Revolution when he was killed not far from the hall in the Boston Massacre of 1770.

Peterson said he wrote a letter to the mayor in May and hasn’t heard back.

Walsh has said it’s not the right time to debate the name change, given the emotion following the Charlottesville disturbance and heated arguments over removing Confederate monuments across the country.

Historians also suggested caution.

Robert Allison, a Suffolk University history professor, said it would be a “misguided and ineffectual” way to set history straight. “Erasing history by changing names is not a way to engage it, or understand it, but simply a way to forget it,” he said.