In the summer of 2020 inspired by long standing calls to action by Black and Indigenous communities and their allies to address monuments that celebrate white supremacy and colonial violence, and Sir Geoff Palmer and Adam Ramsay’s campaign to recontextualize Edinburgh’s Melville Monument, I created an online petition calling on the City of Toronto to rename Dundas Street.
VIEW THE ORIGINAL “LET’S RENAME DUNDAS STREET PETITION.”
Citing the role the street’s namesake, Henry Dundas, First Viscount Melville played in delaying the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, his links to genocidal violence in the Caribbean, and the colonization of Indigenous land and knowledge that the street represented, the petition gathered over 14,000 signatures and opened what the City of Toronto has called “One of the most high-profile examples about who and what the city remembers.”
The petition has, as of writing, resulted in a July 2021 vote by City Council to rename Dundas Street and all municipal assets bearing the Dundas name, and a creative, and ceremony-centred approach to deciding a new name for Toronto’s longest East-West thoroughfare. Additionally, it has inspired the creation and adoption in August 2022 of a new commemorative framework for the City of Toronto. The success of the petition to rename Dundas Street was also cited by Toronto Mayor John Tory as playing a role in the decision to rename Ryerson University, now Toronto Metropolitan University, in 2021.
The campaign to rename Dundas Street has and continues to bring together transnational alliances of scholars from Scotland, Canada and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora as well as established global solidarities between artists, thinkers, community elders and traditional knowledge keepers.
The project has received extensive media coverage from around the world and is featured in the BAFTA award-winning documentary Scotland, Slavery and Statues created for BBC Scotland. Two other documentary projects are currently in the works. The petition and campaign to rename Dundas Street were also short-listed for a Heritage Toronto Award for Public History in 2021.
The campaign, it’s significance, knock-on effects, and where it fits within local interventions into public memory space is the focus of my PhD research and project, which has been generously supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship.
MORE INFORMATION:
Rename Dundas Street OFFICIAL Website
City of Toronto Recognition Review Website
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