Checking off another item on the racial wokeness to-do list, Boston's Public Improvement Commission on Thursday voted to change the name of Dudley Square in the city's Roxbury neighborhood to Nubian Square. The new name, reported the Boston Globe on Friday, is intended to evoke "the strength and skill of the ancient Nubian Empire, one of the earliest civilizations in Africa." The old designation, which honored colonial Governor Thomas Dudley, had to go because "many supporters of the name change say that . . . Dudley perpetuated slavery."
In reality, as the Globe story noted, there is no evidence that Dudley ever owned slaves, and "his role in the promotion of slavery is somewhat murky."
More than somewhat.
Byron Rushing, a former president of both the Roxbury Historical Society and Boston's Museum of African American History, says that no proof exists that Dudley had anything to do with slavery, and that it amounts to "lying about history" to claim otherwise. "I've really searched, and I've found no evidence that Dudley ever owned slaves," Rushing told the Globe's Brian MacQuarrie . As for claims that the colonial governor encouraged slaveholding, Rushing says the opposite is closer to the truth. In 1641, Dudley signed a document called the "Body of Liberties," which had been drafted by the General Court. It was a remarkable charter of individual freedoms, unique to the New World. (Four decades later it would be revoked by England's King Charles II.) Among its many provisions was one that significantly restricted slavery:
91. There shall never be any bond slavery, villeinage, or Captivity amongst us unless it be lawful Captives taken in just wars, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us. And these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God . . . concerning such persons doth morally require. This exempts none from servitude who shall be Judged thereto by Authority.
So the idea that Dudley's name must be removed from Roxbury's commercial center out of a proper sensitivity to the history of slavery is more than a little foolish and ahistorical.
On the other hand, Dudley's reputation isn't in any danger. One of the most influential personages in early Massachusetts, he served as the colony's second governor. He was also a founder of Harvard College, he helped establish the Roxbury Latin School, he picked the spot for the creation of what became Cambridge, and he was the father of Anne Bradstreet , America's first woman of letters and a poet of such renown that her poems were included in the library of King George III. Though the square in Roxbury may no longer bear his name, the avenue running through it — Dudley Street — does, as do the nearby bus station, a Harvard residence hall, and a town in central Massachusetts.
Even if you accept the contention of Roxbury activists that Dudley's name had to be scrapped from the square because that 17th-century Puritan maybe, sorta-kinda, allegedly had a connection to slavery, how in the world is "Nubian" an improvement?
Slavery was not only practiced in Nubia, it was a well-established element of its foreign trade and diplomacy. Here, for example, is anthropologist and archaeologist William Y. Adams, winner of the African Studies Association's prestigious Herskovits Prize for his scholarship on Nubian history (boldface added):
The Ballana royal tombs [in southern Nubia], excavated in the 1930s, contained an immense wealth of jewelry, furniture, and weaponry, as well as sacrificed animals and slaves. . . . [T]he Baqt treaty, negotiated between the rulers of Makouria [a Nubian kingdom] and the Muslim Emirs of Egypt in the year 652. . . . Under terms of the treaty the political and religious autonomy of the Nubians were guaranteed, provided that they made an annual payment of slaves and other goods to the Islamic Governor at Aswan, guaranteed safety of Egyptian merchants traveling to Nobatia, and returned any runaway slaves from Egypt. . . .
Trade with Egypt evidently flourished . . . during nearly the whole of the medieval period. The main exports were slaves and dates; while the Nubians received in exchange wine, textiles, and luxury goods of glass, glazed pottery, and bronze.
In its Nubia Gallery, the Oriental Institute Museum in Chicago makes the same point:
The Baqt [treaty] regulated trade relations between Christian Nubia and Islamic Egypt for almost 600 years. Aswan and Qasr Ibrim were the centers for this trade, which focused on gold, ivory, and slaves, exchanged for Egyptian textiles, ceramics, and glass.
A long Wikipedia entry on "Slavery in Sudan" summarizes the slavery that was common in ancient Nubia, and notes too that slavery in that region, as in much of Arab-ruled Africa, is endemic even now. If, out of horror at the memory of slavery, the name of the main square in Roxbury had to be changed, how could anyone think "Nubian" would be a change for the better? To repeat: Slavery exists in Nubia — aka Sudan — today. The victims are frequently black African Christians abducted from the south.
"One 11-year-old Christian boy told me about his first days in captivity," reported Michael Rubin, a scholar at the Washington Institute, in an essay for The Wall Street Journal.
"I was told to be a Muslim several times, and I refused, which is why they cut off my finger." Twelve-year-old Alokor Ngor Deng was taken as a slave in 1993. She has not seen her mother since the slave raiders sold the two to different masters. Thirteen-year-old Akon was seized by Sudanese military while in her village five years ago. She was gang-raped by six government soldiers, and witnessed seven executions before being sold to a Sudanese Arab.
Many freed slaves bore signs of beatings, burnings and other tortures. More than three-quarters of formerly enslaved women and girls reported rapes.
It is that record of slavery both ancient and modern that led the Bay State Banner — Boston's storied African-American newspaper — to oppose the name change for Dudley Square. "The Nubians also had slaves," the paper observed last year. "In fact, the Nubians have become mixed with other ethnic groups in Sudan, and they still have slaves today."
Ah, but racial-identity politics are in the saddle and ride mankind, to paraphrase Emerson, and once the forces of political correctness decided that Dudley Square must become Nubian Square, nothing could be allowed to interfere. Not even an election: A clear majority of voters — 54% — rejected the name change on an advisory ballot question in Boston last November. Nevertheless, Mayor Marty Walsh made it clear that he expected the commission, over which he has ultimate authority, to approve the redesignation, on the grounds that the ballot measure was strongly supported in Roxbury.
"This square will be called Nubian Square," the mayor said last week. "The voters voted it."
I think we can assume Walsh doesn't really take that logic seriously. For if he really believed that citywide election results should be overridden in neighborhoods where voters dissent, he wouldn't expect to be called "Mr. Mayor" when he's in Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. After all, those sections of the city supported challenger Tito Jackson in the last mayoral election.
All of this is beside the point, of course. Election results and Nubian history and the truth about Dudley are of no importance to the woke activists. Neither are the objections of Rushing or the Bay State Banner. Roxbury's square has been renamed because it makes some people feel that they have accomplished meaningful change and expressed racial pride. What a meager substitute for real achievement.
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'What candle is it today?'
I wrote at length about the history of Chanukah in last week's Arguable, and wasn't planning to mention the holiday again. But I happened to come across a memorable true story told by Yuli Edelstein, the current speaker of Israel's parliament, called the Knesset. He was speaking to students at a school in Beitar Illit, a town in the Judean Hills southwest of Jerusalem.
![]() Yuli Edelstein, a former prisoner in the Soviet gulag, is today the speaker of the Israeli Knesset. |
Edelstein was one of the most prominent "refuseniks" in the old Soviet Union — Jews who were persecuted by the Communist government in the 1970s and 1980s when they sought permission to emigrate to Israel. Edelstein, still in his teens, was expelled from university when he applied for an exit visa. When he refused to abandon his Zionist activities, he was arrested and eventually prosecuted on trumped-up drug charges. On December 19, 1984, he was sentenced to three years at a forced labor camp in the Siberian gulag.
"After three months of being in a dungeon," Edelstein told the students, "I came to the court for sentencing. The hall was full of police and security personnel. Normally, relatives were allowed to come to hear the trial, but they filled all the seats with security personnel so my family had nowhere to sit. Only my wife and mother managed to get in.
After the verdict, Edelstein was surrounded by police officers. On the way out, he somehow managed to push his head through the security ring. He had one thing to say to his wife, whom he had not seen for three months, knowing it could be a few years before he would see her again. What was so important for him to shout to her?
"Tanya, what candle is it today?" She didn't understand what he was talking about. He shouted again, "What candle is it today?"
Only after the third time did she realize what he meant. She shouted back: "Tonight we will light the second candle!" It was the first morning of Chanukah [and two flames would be lit that night].
Edelstein did not have a calendar in the dungeon. But he had heard the date in court, and calculated that it must be Chanukah.
That evening, Edelstein somehow found two matches and lit them. "And so," he told the young students in Beitar Illit, "I stood there in front of the window for a few seconds until the matches scorched my fingers. It was perhaps the shortest 'candle' lit in history. I don't even know if I fulfilled the mitzvah [the religious obligation to light a Chanukah candle]. But that night, a little bit of light pushed away a lot of darkness."
Edelstein remained in the gulag until 1987. He emigrated to Israel in 1987, and entered politics nine years later. In 2013, he was elected by a large majority of his colleagues to be the Speaker of the Knesset, and has served in that post ever since.
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If only the Times had been right
Ninety-five years ago this past weekend, in a story published on Dec. 21, 1924, the New York Times reported that Adolf Hitler, the former "demi-god of the reactionary extremists" in Germany, had been released from prison. Hitler had served just nine months of the five-year term to which he had been sentenced after his "Beer Hall Putsch" in Munich — the attempt by his Nazi Party to seize power by force.
The Times reported that Hitler "looked a much sadder and wiser man." He "was no longer to be feared," the paper's sources said, and was expected to "retire to private life" in Austria.
It wasn't the first time the Times had badly misreported the Hitler phenomenon and it certainly wouldn't be the last. Hitler did not fade away quietly to the Austrian countryside in 1924. Seven months after the Times reported that he had been "tamed," he published Mein Kampf . Seven years later, the Nazis were the largest party in the Reichstag. In 1933, Hitler became Germany's chancellor.
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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