Want To Right Racial Wrongs? Rename Daley Plaza After Du Sable

CHICAGO — As expected, the debate on whether to rename Lake Shore Drive after Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the Black man recognized as our city's founding father, has presented itself as a litmus test on the state of racism in our city.

The ordinance to rename Lake Shore Drive after du Sable proposed by Ald. David Moore described Chicago as "shameful" for not having a "major street or drive named after an African American male coming through the central business district … and more appalling that the founder of this great city has no major street named after him in Chicago. It is my hope that this city can right a wrong that is 230 years in the making."

[COMMENTARY]

During Friday's City Council Transportation Committee hearing, Ald. Sophia King suggested that objections she heard to changing Lake Shore Drive's name came from a "place of ignorance, racism."

She urged her colleagues to search their hearts to consider the reason some people feel the need to discuss why the City Council "can't" change the street name to honor du Sable, "and then to start talking about why we should.”

Moore — who revived the pitch to rename Lake Shore Drive after the Black fur trader and our city's first non-indigenous settler after it was floated and failed in 1993 — warned fellow ward bosses there would be repercussions if they try to do "anything underhanded" to stand in the way of "this great cause" to honor Chicago's Black founding father.

The racial context embedded in Moore's proposal presents a question worth asking: What's so racist about not wanting to rename Lake Shore Drive?

We're talking about two separate issues: Honoring du Sable and erasing the identity of an iconic Chicago landmark devoid of racial controversy.

The Michigan Avenue bridge over the Chicago River, a school, a harbor, a tiny park and a South Side museum are named after du Sable, our city's first non-indigenous settler of Haitian descent, but those pale to how our city has honored white historic figures.

Take former Mayor Richard J. Daley, Chicago's boss for 20 years. He supported real estate red lining, opposed integrated schools and built the Dan Ryan Expressway to separate white enclaves from Black-only housing projects on the South Side.

After Daley died in office, Chicago ward bosses named a courthouse, a college, a library and the city's public square (but not a single street) after him.

Nothing should stand in the way of finding a significant way to honor du Sable's contribution to Chicago's history. When you think about it, renaming a roadway — even beloved Lake Shore Drive — might not be a sufficient honor for du Sable, our city's long-overlooked and underappreciated Black founding father.

Then, there's the separate issue of erasing Lake Shore Drive from street signs, a pitch that's hard to get behind for sentimental reasons.

Our city's meandering lakefront thoroughfare is a national treasure like California's Pacific Coast Highway and Route 66. To me, and probably a lot of Chicagoans, it will always be Lake Shore Drive no matter what the street signs say for all the memories of "slipping on down on LSD" stuck in my head like lyrics from the road's iconic namesake song by written by the late Skip Haynes.

It's the same for Chicago's most beloved skyscrapers "Sears Tower" and the "John Hancock Building," even though the people who own those landmarks changed the names.

My favorite baseball team will always play at Sox Park, which is what I've always called it, no matter which corporate Goliath buys up naming rights to the stadium formerly know as "Comiskey."

If aldermen decide Chicago's easternmost downtown parkway should get a new moniker, so be it.

But it's worth noting that they'd only be creating another needless debate on the name change of an iconic landmark. Every now and again, a news editor will summon an unofficial poll asking: Do you still call it Lake Shore Drive?

Du Sable's legacy deserves better than being diminished by such a pointless controversy, particularly when the decision to erase Lake Shore Drive from street signs seems arbitrary.

If the goal is to right the wrongs of our city's racist history by rebranding a Chicago landmark as an act of symbolic reparations for Chicago's lack of monuments to historic minorities, why not at least have the guts to take on one associated with our city's stark racial divide?

If a ward boss had the courage to suggest putting du Sable's name on, say, Daley Plaza —the courtyard named after the Boss whose own great-grandson recently called him a "horribly racist mayor" — that would be a City Council debate worth having.

In the aftermath of a year pocked with civil unrest, Chicagoans could see how many aldermen would defend preserving one of many significant civic markers to a white mayor who, in 1968, ordered cops to "shoot to maim or cripple" looters against the need to honor Chicago's Black founder memorialized with minor honors.

Instead of changing something — anything — consider changing the right thing.

But that would never happen in Chicago, where ignorance and denial remain proudly displayed.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."

More from Mark Konkol:

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