Uncle Tom’s Road – a roughly one-kilometre thoroughfare in rural Chatham-Kent – will soon be known as Freedom Road after the municipality’s council endorsed a request by the Ontario Heritage Trust.
Intended to tackle the negative connotations associated with the term “Uncle Tom,” the name change will officially take place in late July, less than a week before Emancipation Day celebrations at the Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site in Dresden on July 30.
A staff report to council noted the Ontario Heritage Trust, which maintains the Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site as an agency of Ministry of Heritage, Sport, Tourism and Culture Industries, had raised serious concerns about associating “Uncle Tom” – a term typically used as a derogatory epithet for a Black person who is overly submissive or servile to white people – with abolitionist Josiah Henson.
Since the Dresden-based museum is dedicated to retelling the story of Henson, a well-known abolitionist who helped fugitive slaves find freedom in Canada via the Underground Railroad, the trust indicated the continued use of the term “does a disservice to honoring (Henson’s ) inspiring and instructive legacy.”
“As identified by the trust, new opportunities exist to address issues of racism and biases reflected in the term ‘Uncle Tom,’” the staff report stated. “As the collective understanding of the Black presence in Ontario continues to evolve, the trust is able to interpret the story in a more respectful and sensitive manner. The term ‘Uncle Tom’ embodies many of the prejudices and biases at the root of anti-Black racism.”
While an official announcement has yet to be made, councilors were also told the Ontario Heritage Trust intends to change the name of the museum in the near future.
“I purposely left that out of the report in order to leave the announcement of that to the Ontario Heritage Trust,” planning director Ryan Jacques said.
Given the Crown agency’s plans, Jacques suggests it was “beneficial” for the municipality to follow suit “for the same reasons.”
Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site curator Steven Cook said the goal of the twin name changes is to bring the focus back to Josiah Henson instead of the fictional character from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel.
“Uncle Tom didn’t live on this road,” he said. “Josiah Henson lived on this road, and he’s the one that accomplished so much as a leader of the Black community, so that’s what we want to focus on.”
Cook said he’s seen recent comments on social media that “we’re part of the ‘woke’ crowd,” with people denigrating the impending change as some sort of appeasement.
“We’ve been planning this for many, many years and have put in the work to research Henson’s life, get it accurate, and enhance and improve our exhibits,” he said.
When the announcement of the new name is made during the historic site’s Emancipation Day celebration, “we’ll be ready to reclaim Josiah Henson and his story,” Cook said.
Chatham-Kent councilors were also supportive of the reasons for the name change.
“I really appreciate that this is being done in response to the Ontario Heritage Trust’s efforts and obviously, in light of the renaming of the historical site, it makes an awful lot of sense to me,” said Chatham Coun. Brock McGregor, calling the name change “a meaningful step and an important step.”
McGregor told his colleagues he’d fielded questions from residents about other roads in Chatham-Kent with now-problematic names.
“It’s discovered (the road) might be named after someone we shouldn’t have a road named after” and they want to know “how they might go about starting that process,” the councilor said.
McGregor suggests this is an issue the municipality will have to tackle again in the future.
While Chatham Coun. Michael Bondy supported the name-change motion, saying he did understand the request “in this circumstance,” he said he hoped the decision didn’t set a precedent in the municipality.
“There’s a part of me that just sees … revisionist history happening, political correctness,” he said. “If we rename everything that might have a negative connotation, we’re going to be endlessly renaming a lot of things.”
Councilors also raised concerns about how the decisions could impact local tourism since current GPS systems and online maps wouldn’t yet reflect the twin name changes.