Peter Faneuil (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)
“The Boston City Council passed a resolution [on Oct. 25] asking the city to rename Faneuil Hall, the tourist destination and namesake for wealthy 1700s slave trader Peter Faneuil,” progressive establishment newspaper The Boston Globe reported. The measure passed overwhelmingly, by a 10-3 count.
“The move is largely symbolic and is not binding,” the paper noted. “The city’s Public Facilities Commission, appointed by the mayor, has the authority to rename city-owned buildings. But several city councilors said the resolution’s passage pushes forward a citywide conversation around the role symbols play in telling Boston’s broader history.”
There’s Gold in Them Thar White Guilt Hills
The usual leftist language that dominates these one-sided “conversations” is front and center yet again. But there is something else afoot, as is also usually the case: the grasping for cold hard cash. And why not? There’s big bucks to be made decrying “systemic racism” in Boston.
As Liberty Nation documented, the notoriously woke city just one month earlier was reeling over the collapse of a “racial expert’s” lavishly funded institutional venture. “Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research has laid off an undisclosed number of staff members, just over three years after its promising launch to reshape the national discourse on racial and ethnic disparities,” The Globe reported Sept. 15. “The layoffs come as the center, led by renowned author and antiracist scholar Ibram X. Kendi, shifts to a ‘fellowship model,’ according to a university spokesman.”
It is now apparent that there was little substance behind the ill-defined “promise.” Boston University’s independent student newspaper, The Daily Free Press, reports the center received “at least $43 million in grants and gifts” for “what sources say has been an underwhelming output of research.” The money is gone, with nothing to show for it.
“It’s pretty hard for me to imagine they blew through $30 million in two years,” BU political science associate professor Spencer Piston told The Daily Free Press. “There’s been a lack of transparency about how much money comes in and how it’s spent from the beginning, which comports with a larger culture of secrecy.”
Faneuil Hall Is ‘Main Target’
Did Boston progressives learn a thing from this extremely expensive folly? Just a few weeks later, the racialists were back, demanding Faneuil Hall be sacrificed in the name of social justice. Oh, but there’s more to it than that.
“A group called the New Democracy Coalition has been pushing to rename Faneuil Hall over the last five years because of Faneuil’s enslavement of and trading of human beings, and this past May the group delivered a petition with more than 3,000 signatures to City Council President Ed Flynn stating their demand. Some members staged sit-ins outside Mayor Michelle Wu’s office, a protest that led to arrests,” The Globe reported on Sept. 29.
(Photo By Nancy Lane/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images)
“If we do not have the public conversations around how to better deal with the issue of anti-black racism, we’re going to continue to endure it,” the group’s founder, Kevin C. Peterson, is quoted as saying.
Peterson is the driving force behind the years-long sustained attack on Faneuil Hall. He is looking for a lot more than talk. And he’s not hiding the fact. “Our work on changing the name of Faneuil Hall is grounded in our corporate quest for racial repair,” New Democracy Coalition states on its website.
A June 2022 article published by an overtly supportive NPR is jarringly upfront about the money aims. Once again, performative theater by the Boston City Council was involved.
“Boston has just become the first major city to offer a formal apology for its role in trans-Atlantic slavery,” NPR reported. “Coming nearly four centuries after slavery began here, a city council resolution that passed unanimously [on June 15] condemns the unique ‘dastardliness’ of slavery, and its legacy of ‘systemic white supremacy and racism’ that’s reflected in ongoing racial inequities in housing, education, income and more.”
The bravery of the city council is simply stunning. Hold on to your wallet, you know what’s coming next:
“Councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson, who proposed the apology resolution, calls it ‘an opening salvo.’ She said the city must first acknowledge how ‘great personal and institutional wealth in Boston was built on the backs of enslaved Africans who reaped none of the economic benefits from their labor,’ before the city can ‘begin discussions about what it means to truly undo the harm.’”
Are we misconstruing these words? Peterson clarified.
“Peterson, who helped push Boston’s formal apology, says he hopes it will not only ‘open the door’ for a serious conversation about reparations, but also that the explicit admission of responsibility will compel it,” NPR continued. “He’s also hoping to see prompt action on the part of the resolution that pledges to remove ‘prominent anti-black symbols in Boston.’”
“Faneuil Hall is the main target,” Peterson stressed. “We said from the beginning that changing the name of Faneuil Hall was explicitly related to a reparations movement in Boston,” he exclaimed in a Medium.com article posted by the New Democracy Coalition. “There is no divisibility between the claims we made in 2017 about the Faneuil Hall name change and the cause of reparations in Boston for African Americans.”
So there you have it. Peterson’s long and melodramatic campaign to erase Faneuil Hall from US history is inextricably tied to a larger effort to extract a massive financial layout from Americans today for actions that date back 240 years and more.
Unsurprisingly, Peterson is associated with Kendi’s BU boondoggle. He’s listed on the center’s website as a “graduate affiliate.” “Areas of expertise: Policy, Race and Ethnicity” his Antiracist Research Center bio reads.
It seems one person at least learned a thing or two there after all.
