Resolution pertaining to the renaming of Washington Street

Annual Town Meeting, May 2018

National trends of heightened partisanship have led, among other directions, to reconsiderations of longstanding social tensions. The greatest of these wove the tragic history of slaveholding, the devastating Civil War of 1861-1865 that abolished it and long struggles around Reconstruction, Jim Crow repression, school segregation, the Civil Rights movement, anti-discrimination in education, employment and housing, and the goals of Equal Opportunity that still engage us.

Over time, we learned that some of our historical icons had backgrounds in the Era of Slavery, including our first President and subsequent Presidents. During the seventeenth century, several residents of land that later became Brookline owned slaves who worked on their farms and in their households. There have been efforts to expunge some of the relics from the Era of Slavery, including statues of Confederate officeholders and soldiers and names given to streets, buildings and other public features.

This Article poses to Town Meeting, and should it pass will pose to our Naming Committee, the question of whether one of Brookline's most prominent streets should continue to carry the name of a major slaveholder. Washington Street threads through Village Square and past Brookline's Town Hall, main library, courthouse, police station and fire headquarters, then heads northwest toward Brighton Center and through Oak Square into Newton.

As John Rhodenhamel recounts in his illustrated biography [1998, Yale University Press], our nation's first President, George Washington, was born into a Virginia family of slaveholders in 1732. He acquired much more property and many more slaves through his wife, Martha. Slavery is an inseparable part of his life history. In the economy of his place and his time, he could not otherwise have sustained such a large, agrarian enterprise as the one he managed.

There is evidence in Washington's personal correspondence that he had turned against slavery before he became President, but he did not carry such a view into his public life. The will that he left when he died in 1799 freed all 125 slaves he then owned and provided a substantial share of his estate toward their education and support. Brookline should review Washington's history more thoroughly than an explanatory note such as this one can do and should consider whether maintaining the naming of Washington Street reflects community values.