Circa 1740, Irish philosopher George Berkeley, the Bishop of Cloyne and a noted metaphysician. Last year, the City Council agreed to begin its meetings with a land acknowledgment, recognizing Berkeley as stolen land from its first inhabitants, the Ohlone people.īut now, historians at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, have renewed scrutiny of records indicating that the city’s namesake - Bishop George Berkeley, an 18th-century Irish philosopher and influential scholar - purchased enslaved people to toil at a Rhode Island plantation he briefly operated until 1732. The city’s reputation for anti-imperialism has only grown since becoming the nation’s first city to swap Columbus Day for “Indigenous Peoples Day” in 1992 and installing city-limit signs that declare “Welcome to the City of Berkeley - Ohlone Territory” in 2019. It’s perhaps ironic that Berkeley is the latest place to face this question. But what happens when the name of an entire community is tainted by racial injustice? The problematic pasts of historical figures have forced the renaming of hundreds of buildings and the removal of dozens of statues from public squares across the U.S.
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