Iconic Faneuil Hall an Inspiration for Race Dialogue and Reconciliation in Boston
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” — William Faulkner
On a cool, bright day this past summer in Johannesburg, South Africa, people from all over the globe gathered to celebrate the 100th birthday of Nelson Mandela — “Madiba” as he was affectionately called during his lifetime.
At the Mandela Annual Lecture, which is associated with the celebration, former President Barack Obama offered provocative remarks on race, ethics and leadership — calling Madiba a towering human rights figure and a political redeemer who was always mindful of personal and social history.
Capping off his comments Obama emphasized the need to build society through shared history and democracy, saying: “I believe we have no choice but to move forward; that those of us who believe in democracy and civil rights and a common humanity have a better story to tell. And I believe this not just based on sentiment; I believe it based on hard evidence.”
Madiba’s signature achievement, the 44th president concluded, was his enormous ability to find civic redemption in times of deep racial division, and reconciliation in the midst of ethic recrimination and social rancor. Madiba’s abiding preoccupation throughout his life — whether as an activist with the African National Congress or as president — was to achieve a multiracial democracy, or what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once described as the “beloved community.”
Of course, America too has a history of racial repression, one that lingers even after the nation elected Obama, its first black president, twice.
In recent years our country has been grappling with what to do with the remnants of white hatred expressed in the form of Confederate monuments and memorials that date back to slavery itself. Many monuments have come down under the leadership of city mayors and college presidents who have rightly discerned that any celebratory public or private connection to slavery is odious. These leaders concluded that removing symbolic icons of past racism are necessary steps to take toward building the multiracial democracy that Madiba and King sought. Exorcising our society of some of the representations of America’s original sin marks a capacity to repent that can lead us all to reconciliation.
The city of New Orleans last year removed memorials dedicated to the Confederacy from public spaces across that municipality. In Selma, Alabama, residents changed the names of city streets that referenced Civil War soldiers who waged battle in the name of maintaining slavery — that peculiar institution that left in its wake generations of blacks lacking equal and civic standing, living in what the sociologist Orlando Patterson called an extended “social death.” This summer the city of Charleston, South Carolina, formally apologized for its role in the slave trade after a protracted period of dialogue and reflection on its racial past.
And in Boston civic organizers began an effort of renaming Faneuil Hall to Crispus Attucks Hall. Attucks, who was part black and part Native American, was the first to die in what became the Revolutionary War of Independence against the British. The town fathers of Boston were so impressed with Attucks’ valor against the British that they laid his body in state at Faneuil Hall, the very place activists are now boycotting.
The history of Peter Faneuil is clear. He was a merchant who donated money toward the construction of what is now known as Faneuil Hall. He was a slaver, a cold-hearted trafficker of young African boys — referred to as the “jolly” bachelor who owned five slaves upon his death. Faneuil perceived Africans as inhuman cargo, exchangeable for commodities such as rum and money. For Faneuil, Africans were mere talking work animals, neither worthy of respect nor freedom.
Clergy and activists in Boston have been trying to rename Faneuil Hall by calls for social reparation and public repentance. They argue that in Boston — and in the nation at large — racial inequity cannot be overcome without public reckoning and soul searching, which leads to an examination of the pernicious effects of white supremacy.
The city’s mayor, Martin Walsh, vowed to make racial healing in Boston a priority during his tenure when elected five years ago. Yet, he and the City Council oppose renaming Faneuil Hall. Walsh also opposes a public hearing where Bostonians can have a say in renaming this public building.
Walsh’s reaction may be typical of the white response to exploring the legacy of slavery. Many white Americans seem to believe that past racial sins remain the responsibility of those who committed them; that they have been washed away over the course of time, especially since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. They would have us believe that blacks now live in social and political equality with whites.
Thus, some in the city of Boston wonder why we have undertaken the task of changing the name of Faneuil Hall. They question whether by doing so we erase city’s past. They protest the loss of history and stress the “unfairness” of criticizing slavery from the standpoint of modern society.
Yet, those who oppose our efforts seldom consider that the histories of others — the Native American and the enslaved African — were routinely suppressed as the narrative of white America was lifted and credited for “founding” our nation. Those naysayers are slow to recognize that the past can never be erased, and that many thousand voices have been silenced and ignored. But people who suppress this history ignore this singular fact: that to tell a history of a people without recording the fullness of its pain is a lie needing correction.
The past is ineluctably linked to the present. Murder in the mostly black neighborhood of Mattapan in Boston today is not unconnected with the violence and the legacy of slavery inflicted upon young African men on the auction blocks of that city three hundred years ago. The deep housing segregation patterns noted today in Boston are tied to residential policies that lock blacks in neighborhoods of unforgiving poverty, environmental devastation and poor schools that leave them unprepared in the local economic markets.
Regarding race, the failings of America are profound. These failings have precluded our capacity to develop into a fully realized society dedicated to the principles of freedom and equality articulated so eloquently in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The legacy of American racism makes a mockery of our civic ideals. It sacrifices the better angels of our nature at the slaughterhouse of racial animosity and ethnic antipathy. It suffocates our higher civic purposes in deluded attitudes of racial superiority.
The questions of race — and the many incarnations of white supremacy — are profound because they prompt us all to confront notions of freedom, democracy and restorative justice in ways we seldom do. They not only guide us in how we interpret our history; they also configure how our national story is portrayed. Such portrayals have contorted and suppressed civic truths. And such questions, faced honestly, force us to measure the extent to which the presence of white supremacy remains a pervasive element in American civil society.
Equally important, the claims we collectively make about our history, in relation to American slavery, can become public confessions about our moral integrity, requiring the nation to answer to documented deeds of human trafficking, the rape of black women and the murder and mutilation of millions. For whites to accept responsibility for the horrors of slavery requires them to enter a moral world where the judgment upon them is guilty.
Names, in and of themselves, are neutral. But within the social world they gain meaning that can be uplifting or degrading, depending on the context. For many African Americans names and icons like Faneuil Hall have dismissive connotations. They serve as memories of hatred. They are reminders of the evil of inequality. They are manifestations of inhumane intention. It is essential to denounce such names in the effort of moving forward.
The truth is that we can be a better America — one which evolves into a flourishing multiracial democracy where the dark days of animus have shifted to the radiant hues of full and accepted racial pluralism. Nothing else is really acceptable.
As Obama preached about the moral imperative of a better “story to be told,” we must feel compelled to lend an open mind to his urging — recognizing our common humanity, and then pausing to understand that there is no black history, white history, or Asian American history, per se. Our history is collective, mutually bound, and indivisible — and therefore, a multi-faceted story, which should be fully represented in our public monuments.
Kevin C. Peterson, founder of the New Democracy Coalition, is leading an effort called the Faneuil Hall Racial Reconciliation Project. Its goals are to spur rich, multigenerational dialogue in Boston and foster a civic pathway toward changing the name of Faneuil Hall.
