The Boston City Council last week approved a resolution that calls on the city to change the name of Faneuil Hall because Peter Fanueil was a slave owner.

The measure does not force the Wu administration to do anything, but calls on her to establish a commission or other process to come up with another name for the city-owned historic building - and the mall behind it.

Councillor Tania Fernandes Anderson, who proposed the resolution, said it was long past time for the city to reject the name of a man who enslaved and tortured Blacks. 

The District 7 incumbent councillor rejected the argument this would ignore a part of Boston history. She said the city could put up a plaque or a kiosk explaining the building’s history, “without celebrating a rapist or a white supremacist or a slave owner or, you know, someone who was killing Black people and torturing Black people and purchasing and kidnapping Black people and supporting payments for a ship to enslave Black people.”

She said that even aside from the systemic racism she said Black in Boston continue to experience, “symbols are important” and that too often, they simply tell white people, even “victims of violence in European countries,” that they are welcome in Boston, that “they can be here and be free and then accomplish here,” in a way that Black people simply are not told.

She said the building and marketplace’s new name would be best left to whatever commission the city sets up, but she suggested either renaming it after a person who fought for freedom, such as Crispus Attucks or Frederick Douglass or after an ideal, such as Liberty or Freedom.

City councillors Frank Baker, Ed Flynn and Michael Flaherty voted against the resolution. Councillor Erin Murphy, who votes with those councilors on divisive issues, broke with them and voted for the measure. Also voting for it: Councillors Arroyo, Breadon, Coletta, Durkan, Fernandes Anderson, Lara, Louijeune, Mejia and Worrell. 

Baker said that while he could disagree with some of what Fernandes Anderson said, he was not necessarily opposed to the idea, but rather that the resolution was simply too vague. For example, it left out the issue of naming - and deserved the sort of detailed discussion that could only happen in a council committee session, where frank and open exchanges are encouraged. Flynn and Flaherty did not discuss their reasons for voting no.

Arroyo said he would like to go even further than downtown, that it’s equally past time to rename Maverick Square and Maverick station on the Blue Line because Samuel Maverick was as reprehensible as Faneuil.