{"id":17269,"date":"2020-06-22T17:45:11","date_gmt":"2020-06-22T21:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=17269"},"modified":"2020-06-24T07:41:08","modified_gmt":"2020-06-24T11:41:08","slug":"faneuil-hall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2020\/06\/22\/faneuil-hall\/","title":{"rendered":"Boston\u2019s Faneuil Hall Is Named For A Slaver, Kevin Peterson Launches Hunger Fast Calling For It To Be Renamed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Boston\u2019s Faneuil Hall is named for a slaver. This afternoon, Kevin Peterson, founder of the Boston-based New Democracy Coalition<\/a>, launched a hunger fast at the landmark across from Boston City Hall as part of his multi-year effort to get the building renamed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis building behind me is a publicly owned building that we want to have renamed in the city of Boston because it\u2019s named after a slave owner,\u201d Kevin Peterson said in a Facebook live video<\/a> this afternoon. \u201c\u2026We do not want to remove the hall or have it torn down. We want to have the hall renamed after someone who wasn\u2019t a slave owner.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been petitioning the mayor for over two years to simply allow citizens of Boston to hold a hearing,” Peterson said. \u201cAnd the mayor of Boston has refused to talk to us and the City Council has refused to talk to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Update June 24:<\/strong> On the afternoon of June 23, the press office for Boston Mayor Marty Walsh emailed: “We have no comment on the demonstration, but as a reminder, below is the Mayor’s previous statement on renaming Faneuil Hall: ‘If we were to change the name of Faneuil Hall today, 30 years from now, no one would know why we did it. Not many people know about the history of that man. And over the years, Faneuil Hall has become a place where good things have happened: historic speeches such as Frederick Douglass\u2019 call for the end to slavery, the signing of forward thinking legislation like the Affordable Care Act, and where hundreds of people take their oath of citizenship every year. What we should do instead, is figure out a way to acknowledge the history so people understand it. We can’t erase history, but we can learn from it.'”<\/p>\n

Late that night, the New Democracy Coalition sent out an email saying: “As Black organizers begin a second night of camping outside of historic Faneuil Hall, Mayor Marty Walsh continued to avoid meeting about setting a public hearing date related to changing the name of Faneuil Hall.”<\/p>\n

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