Read on Twitter
The Park District’s Board has called an emergency meeting to consider whether to rename Douglas Park in honor of Frederick Douglass. Young people have been demanding the city change the name for 3 years: https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/07/22/douglas-park-renamed-for-frederick-douglass-park-district-set-to-vote-on-history-making-name-change/
Douglas Park is in Lawndale, a Black community on the West Side. The park is currently named for civil-war era senator Stephen Douglas, a White supremacist famous for arguing that States have the right to permit slavery if they want to. His wife owned at least 100 slaves.
Young folks in the neighborhood started going to Board meetings for the Park District in 2017 to get the name changed. But the Board never responded to their requests. In the years since then their campaign has been met with silence from the city.
But after last week’s attempt to tear down the Columbus statue, all of a sudden, totally by coincidence, after years of silence, the Board calls a meeting with only one major agenda item— reviewing the proposal to rename Douglas Park.
The obvious reality is that the mayor, cops and other city officials are shaming protesters for toppling statues... yet the attempt to bring down Columbus has been more effective in pushing the city to take action than years of doing it “the right way” with the city’s process.
No doubt this will be used politically to show that the bureaucratic process works. To show that the system hasn’t failed. To delegitimize the folks who took to the streets.
