May 10, 2023
The City of Berkeley is struggling with its slaveholding namesake
By Andrea Widburg
The city of Berkeley has long been associated with leftism. Famed San Francisco columnist Herb Caen nicknamed the city Berserkeley as an homage to its radical politics. The extremism infects both the town and its famous campus, the University of California, Berkeley. Although most other college campuses have caught up with UC Berkeley, it’s still the grande dame of leftist extremism. That’s what makes it so lovely that Berkeley is wrestling with a bitter historic truth: The name “Berkeley” is an homage to a one-time Rhode Island-based slaveholder who was unimpressed by Native Americans.
From the Bay Area News Group:
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. But what happens when the name of an entire community is tainted by racial injustice?
It’s perhaps ironic that Berkeley is the latest place to face this question. 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. 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.
But 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.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/the_city_of_berkeley_is_struggling_with_its_slaveholding_namesake.html
