Dearborn Removes Orville Hubbard's Name From Ballroom

DEARBORN, MI — A ballroom within the Ford Community and Performing Arts Center is being rebranded and will no longer carry the name of Orville Hubbard, Dearborn's longest-serving mayor whose mid-20th century and racist views have been controversial in recent years.

The Dearborn City Council voted unanimously Tuesday night to remove Hubbard's name from the ballroom within the Ford Community and Performing Arts Center, which opened in 2001 and rename it after Abraham Lincoln.

"The ballroom is a community space and ultimately we want it to be a space that promoted unity above all else," Dearborn Councilwoman Erin Bynes, who helped spearhead the movement to remove Hubbard's name from the ballroom, told Patch in an interview Wednesday. "I think this sends a positive message that we are being proactive ."

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The ballroom, originally named the Dome Rome, was named after Hubbard in 2007, Mary Laundroche, the public information director with Dearborn said in an email.

"The City reinvested in this facility to turn it into something very desirable and unique in the region," the city said in a statement to Patch Wednesday. "To signal this change, and as a way to make it more welcoming to people from all backgrounds, the name has been rebranded from the Hubbard Ballroom to the Lincoln Ballroom.”

Lincoln was chosen as the new name in part because of the elegance of the name "Lincoln," but also because of the positive association the name has with the former president as well as the Lincoln line of vehicles, Bynes noted.

Hubbard was Dearborn's mayor from 1942 to 1978. He has been described as a "personal symbol of suburban America's resistance to racial integration" by biographer David Good.

A statue of Hubbard outside Dearborn's city hall was removed in 2015 and placed outside the Dearborn Historical Museum. The statue was moved again in 2020, amid demonstrations across the nation about police brutality and inequity, city council officials told The Detroit Free Press at the time.