As cities grapple with what to do with Confederate statues, an advocacy group is calling for renaming Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall because its namesake had ties to the slave trade.

The brick meeting house, built in 1742 and nicknamed the “Cradle of Liberty,” was where Samuel Adams and other American colonists made some of the earliest speeches urging independence from Britain.

Decades later, Frederick Douglass and other prominent abolitionists of the 1800s would use its famous stage to call for an end to slavery.

But Kevin Peterson, founder of the New Democracy Coalition, says it’s past time to change the hall’s name because it was built and donated to Boston by Peter Faneuil, a wealthy merchant who owned and traded slaves. ...

Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College history professor, said she supports removing all “celebratory” Confederate monuments from public properties but opposes simply renaming or removing all memorials to “problematic forebears.” “This country was founded on racial, gender and class biases. That is inescapable,” she said. “Our complex history needs to be contextualized, recognizing both the weaknesses and the strengths of our ancestors.”