Providence officials move to rename spots that celebrate slave traders

PROVIDENCE — The names could be emblazoned on a street sign, across the side of a school or at the base of a statue in a public park — “Obadiah Brown,” “Esek Hopkins,” “William Magee.”

For some, they are simply titles for a specific address or building. But for others — people of color, especially — the names that belong to some of Providence’s historical figures who participated in slavery are a constant reminder of this country’s dark history and continuing struggle with systemic racism.

“My mother used to call them ‘minor insults,’” Ray Rickman, executive director of the Providence-based Black history nonprofit Stages of Freedom, said of the street names and monuments that pay tribute to people with ties to slavery. “That’s horrible when you have a lifetime of that stuff in your face.”

In 2017, Rickman worked with the Providence City Council to change Magee Street — a street spanning one block near the Brown University campus formerly named for Providence slave trader William Magee — to Bannister Street, in honor of Edward Bannister, who lived in the city and was the first African American artist to receive a national award for his work, and his wife, Christiana Carteaux Bannister, a Black and Narragansett businesswoman and abolitionist.

But as protests over the killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis, continue across the country, activists have renewed calls to remove statues and rename streets and buildings that honor people with legacies that include slavery and genocide.

In Providence, City Council members have passed a resolution to rename Obadiah Brown Road and Field, named for the owner of the first-known Providence-based slave ship; the Providence School Board has proposed renaming Esek Hopkins Middle School, named for a slave ship captain; and a Special Committee for Commemorative Works will soon make recommendations on the fate of a Christopher Columbus statue taken off its pedestal at Elmwood and Reservoir avenues last month.

Those opposed to the changes liken the moves to rewriting history and say that historical figures shouldn’t be judged by today’s moral standards.

But proponents say changing these names is an important step toward acknowledging the country’s true history and building a more equal society.

Esek Hopkins

Hopkins served as the first commander of the U.S. Navy, but before the American Revolution worked as a sea captain and merchant who participated in the slave trade with Providence’s Brown family.

His most infamous mission took place in 1764, when he captained the Sally, a slave ship owned by Nicholas Brown and Company, and helped to forcibly capture 196 people from the African coast, according to records from the Brown University archives. During the return trip, a mutiny arose on the ship, and 109 Africans died during the uprising, as well as from starvation and disease and by suicide.

“I couldn’t find any remorse between the Browns and Hopkins, other than the fact that the slave ship journey went awry,” said Caleb Horton, an archivist for the City of Providence who researches some of the most prominent Providence families’ connections to the slave trade.

The only person who seemed to be affected by the atrocity was Moses Brown, one of Nicholas Brown’s brothers, for whom the Moses Brown School in Providence is named. He later became a Quaker and an abolitionist.

Besides Esek Hopkins Middle School, which is part of the Providence Public School District, Hopkins also has a statue in his honor at a park near his historic home on Admiral Street.

Rickman said students have proposed renaming their middle school after their dean of students, Frederick Lovegrove, who died in February and who Rickman called a “21st-century hero.”

“Why don’t we take this as a learning moment,” he said, “and elevate somebody that schoolchildren can [look at and] go, ‘Wow.’”

Obadiah Brown

Providence City Council Majority Leader Jo-Ann Ryan has proposed changing a road and field named for Obadiah Brown, a Providence merchant who participated in his family’s trading activities, which included a 1736 mission to Africa on the sloop Mary, the first-known Providence slave ship.

“That’s not a legacy I want to see honored in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood,” Ryan, who represents Elmhurst, Mount Pleasant and Manton, said during a City Council meeting last Thursday. “Our city’s children should not have to go to school or play on a road or field named for a well-known slave trader.”

Ryan hopes to rename the road and field after Patrick J. McCarthy, Providence’s first foreign-born mayor, who served from 1907 to 1909. He immigrated with his family to the United States from Ireland to escape the potato famine and was forced to undergo a quarantine period in Boston Harbor, where both his parents died and he was separated from his siblings, according to Horton.

McCarthy was a progressive mayor who advocated for an eight-hour work day for city employees, Horton said. The Cranston Street Armory was also built during his tenure.

“I believe that changing the name will help to replace the legacy of slave trading with an important figure that represents the ideals that make this country great,” Ryan said.

Reconciling or erasing?

Rhode Island, just like any state in the nation, has to come to terms with its full history, said April Brown, recently appointed to serve on the city’s Special Committee for Commemorative Works, a panel tasked with reviewing monuments and other honorific pieces in the city.

“We’re not like Richmond, Virginia, or Mississippi or Texas,” she said, referring to states that have displayed statues of Confederate generals, “but we still do have a complicated history with race, with gender, with all these things that humans deal with. It’s about who occupies the space and then who gets to have their story told in that space.”

One of the committee’s first assignments will be to make a recommendation to the Board of Park Commissioners on what should happen with the Columbus statue that was removed last month amid calls from activists who say his legacy of genocide and slavery of Indigenous people should not be honored.

“There’s trauma sometimes behind what we memorialize, so we have to engage the community to find out what harm you’re causing,” she said.

But critics of the decisions to remove monuments and rename sites say they are often misguided attempts at political correctness.

“Political correctness is just a snapshot of the current culture,” said Mike Stenhouse, founder and CEO of the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a public-policy think tank. “There might be a time years from now when we re-appreciate some of these people and then their symbols are gone.”

While Stenhouse said he understood people’s concerns and agreed with decisions to remove monuments of Confederate generals — whom many consider to have been traitors — he said he feels the requests to rename and replace have gone too far.

“Just because emotions are high and flowing one direction doesn’t necessarily mean we have to take all these steps,” he said. “...We’re going to work with you on this, but what’s the bargain? You work with us, too. We can’t just let it always be a one-way street.”

Others say the actions are akin to erasing history, not reconciling with it.

“Is there anybody who’s so perfect that they haven’t done anything in their life that you couldn’t find objectionable years later?” said David Talan, co-chair of the Providence Republican City Committee, who opposed the removal of the Columbus statue. “... I just don’t like holding people to a standard that didn’t apply in those days.”

But Rickman said the wickedness of slavery is not, and never has been, up for debate.

The founding fathers even discussed slavery at the Constitutional Convention, he said, resulting in the Three Fifths Compromise, an agreement that three-fifths of the enslaved population of each state would count toward representation in Congress.

Even George Washington, America’s first president, who enslaved hundreds of people, appeared to question the institution of slavery after the Revolutionary War, though he never made a public statement while he was alive, according to his estate, Mount Vernon, which is now a museum. Washington ordered in his will that the people he enslaved be freed after his wife’s death.

“Slavery was wrong, and everybody knew it was wrong,” Rickman said. “Just because you know something is wrong doesn’t mean you speak up or you put an end to it, but there’s no defense of slavery.

“If you did evil, you should not be honored in the public square,” he said.

Who should be memorialized?

April Brown, who also serves as co-director of the Langston Hughes Community Poetry Reading, which celebrates the work of the legendary Black poet, said she remembers walking past the Columbus statue as a child with her grandmother, who was Narragansett and lived in the Elmwood neighborhood.

“She would just be fussing at that statue,” she said. “...The pain that that caused was really pretty virulent for a 70-, 80-year-old woman.”

Brown said she would like to see monuments in Providence that memorialize Indigenous people and African Americans who contributed to Rhode Island history.

“At the very least, you really have to talk to the community, because that’s who it’s supposed to be for,” she said.

Rickman said that this could be a moment for political leaders to start to honor contemporaries - people who children can recognize and look up to, he said.

The Providence Board of Park Commissioners on Tuesday officially named the Providence River Pedestrian Bridge after Michael Van Leesten, the late civil rights activist and one of the founders of the Opportunities Industrialization Center of Rhode Island, which provides job training, career counseling and other programs to people from underrepresented groups. Providence City Council members first took up the issue in February.

This, Rickman said, is the perfect example of how important sites can be named going forward.

“[Van Leesten] is the ultimate 21st-century hero,” Rickman said, “...the kind of person that you should name a bridge after.”