The Boston Red Sox have a renamed street to call home.
On Thursday, the city’s Public Improvement Commission unanimously approved the baseball team’s request to return Yawkey Way ― a short stretch of road on which sits Fenway Park ― to its original name, CBS Boston reported. So it will be Jersey Street again.
There had been increasing pressure to change the Yawkey name with its ties to the Red Sox’s racist past. Current team owner John Henry told the Boston Herald that he was personally “haunted by what went on here a long time before we arrived.”
The street was dubbed Yawkey Way in 1977 after the team’s late owner, Tom Yawkey, who oversaw the Sox through 44 seasons. Yawkey had resisted the racial integration of baseball, choosing not to hire future Hall of Famers Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays. The Red Sox would become the last MLB team to integrate black players in 1959 ― 12 years after Robinson broke racial barriers with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Over the last year, articles have compared the continued use of Yawkey’s name outside Fenway Park to memorials for Confederate soldiers.
The Yawkey Foundations, which have made more than $450 million worth of charitable donations in the name of Tom and his wife Jean Yawkey over the years, argued against the street’s name change and said it was based on “a false narrative about his life.”
“We have always acknowledged that it is regrettable that the Red Sox were the last Major League baseball team to integrate. We also realize there were strong feelings in favor of renaming Yawkey Way based on that painful fact and other criticisms about the team’s record concerning race and inclusivity,” the organization said in a statement on Thursday. “But we also believe that consideration of the whole story of the team’s efforts to integrate and the full picture of Tom Yawkey’s life more than justified keeping the name Yawkey Way.”