Debates about race in America were burning long before Donald Trump threw gas on the fire. For years, cities and towns across the country have been engaged in an ongoing debate over changing the names of landmarks and removing statues that memorialize slave owners. Cambridge is a town with a lot of history from the time that humans could own other humans. Earlier this year, the city council approved an ordinance to compile a list of city landmarks with ties to the American slave trade and look at renaming them. Cambridge City Councilor E. Denise Simmons, who introduced the ordinance, spoke with WGBH Radio's Arun Rath. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Arun Rath: So one example of this I found out about is Vassal Lane. It's a short road near Fresh Pond. Who were the Vassals and why would we not want to honor them?
E. Denise Simmons: They basically built their empire on the backs of free labor, and we would go on later on and name buildings and streets after them. And so when I found out about that, I said we can't continue to do that. How do we fix that? And it's an interesting conversation, with some people saying let's not do that, because he did so much for Cambridge. But I say, he built what he has on the backs of people who were not free and were not paid.
Rath: Now this is just one example of one small road in a city that has a lot of roads. Do you have a sense of how many Vassal Lane-type streets there may be in Cambridge, how much work there is to do?
Simmons: There's a lot of work. There's the Vassals, there's the Endicotts, there's the Trowbridges. We just want to know how many more streets are like that and what are we going to do to tell the full story about these families.
Rath: How do you go about that? Is it just going through public records?
Simmons: It is going through public records. It's trying to figure out that documentation. So you have to look in wills, you have to look in tax records. It's long, it's slow, it's tedious, but it's important work.
Rath: Do you have any idea how long this might take?
Simmons: I don't. A year, maybe. It's trying to find a thread and see if that thread leads you somewhere. So for the churches that have this information, it's kind of easy if they've collected it, written it down, saved it. Tax records, it's how those tax records are kept and what they documented and what they didn't document. Oftentimes it'll be just a first name, but they'll say "owned by." And so you're tracing it back. It's very, very difficult to do slave history.
Rath: And then once you get to a point, hopefully where you have this detailed list compiled and in your hands, what's the plan then?
Simmons: So we're talking about that. These are going to be important discussions that are learning opportunities as well as correcting the historical narrative.
Rath: What's your own feeling, because there's the argument where people would say that taking them away is erasing or even whitewashing history, and others who say that we've got to take these names down. What's your own personal feeling?
Simmons: My granddaughter goes to school here in Cambridge. And where does she go to school? She's at the Vassal Lane Upper School. And so I asked myself, do I want my granddaughter going to a school named after someone who was not a really good person. I'm willing to have a discussion about how we correct history in a way that takes people whose blood sweat and tears made this city but were never honored, thought about, or in any way memorialized.
Rath: I'm kind of curious about where the line is drawn. It's a complicated question, because if we said we were taking on all slave owners, many of the founding fathers would be in there. So it's sort of degrees of morality of how bad they were. Is that right?
Simmons: This is an opportunity for us to look at ourselves, apply some introspection, and decide what we want to do to correct it. I'm open to all the opportunities of looking at that and where that guides us.
