Boston’s Faneuil Hall was named after a slave owner. City council calls for renaming the site

By MICHAEL CASEY
Associated Press

BOSTON (AP) — The Boston City Council has passed a resolution that calls for renaming Faneuil Hall, a popular tourist site that is named after a wealthy merchant who owned and traded slaves. In calling for the hearing, the author of the measure 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.