| Comment | Removing somebody's name from a street doesn't mean "We're gonna pretend this never happened" - It's saying "This happened, and we don't think that's worthy of the honour of a street name anymore". Having a street, or a square, or a building named after you is something we do to honour somebody, and yeah sometimes our values change and stuff we used to honour just doesn't fly anymore. This works both ways, too - In the 50s Alan Turing was convicted of homosexuality and chemically castrated, now we put him on the £50 note.
Ideally I'd like to see the names changed, to stop honouring those people, and the original names and the histories clearly recorded. Either a plaque under the new street name, or in a museum (that's what those are for after all). I'd also settle for keeping the names but adding plaques explaining the historical context, although it seems to me like if we did that, we're just admitting "Yeah this guy was a slaver but we're letting him keep his honours anyway". The only thing that WOULD be erasure of history would be leaving the names as they are and not adding anything to explain the context. |
|---|