Dudley Square is likely to go the way of plaques and statues that honored Confederate generals such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

The square was not named in honor of a Civil War figure but for Thomas Dudley, a colonial governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was in office in 1641 when the colony first legally sanctioned slavery. Activists say his family went on to benefit from the slave trade.

A five-year campaign to rename Dudley Square pressed forward in a move some called unprecedented: Boston officials put the question to a citywide referendum, the only option under law, and despite the question failing plan to move forward based on the results of 16 precincts surrounding the landmark.

As U.S. cities grapple with how to address the country’s history of racism — and how far the reckoning should spread — locals say the Dudley Square ballot question marks a victory for predominantly black neighborhoods that wanted to see such a change and will spark more discussion about which historical figures Boston celebrates.

“We just made a commitment because of the fact that there’s so many streets in our community that are named after former slave owners,” said Sadiki Kambon, director of the Black Community Information Center.

Kambon led the five-year campaign to change the landmark to Nubian Square. The name honors a local gift shop called A Nubian Notion that anchored the square for five decades before closing in 2017. It’s also a nod to the Nubian empire, an early civilization in northeastern Africa.

“Dudley is a former slave owner, and he and his son upheld laws that oppressed those people to keep them in slavery. That is not something that you should be proud of,” said Dana “Supreme” Richardson, one of the Nubian Square campaign volunteers. “That is not something that should be in a square that mostly serves people of color.”

A school bus turns in Dudley Square in Roxbury on Monday, Nov. 4, where some in the black community have pushed for a name change to Nubian Square.

The Nubian Square campaign was hardly the first initiative of its kind. In April 1986, a packed room at the Shelbourne Center convinced the Washington Park board of directors that 15.3-acre parcel should be renamed in honor of a hero who resonates with the predominantly black and brown community: Malcolm X.

“This is our community and our park,” Sadiki Kambon told the Boston Globe at the time. “We should have our park named for one of our heroes. George Washington was not one of our heroes, but Malcolm X was.”

The difference with the Nubian Square campaign is that it culminated at a time when activists across the country are pushing to remove landmarks tied to slavery, Kambon said. While those questions are being taken up by state preservation boards or judges, Boston put the question to a direct vote.

“The process that we just went through in the city of Boston certainly is precedent-setting,” said Boston City Councilor Kim Janey, who represents Roxbury, the South End, Dorchester and Fenway.

Janey said the Nubian Square question isn’t so different from other debates about landmarks around the country.

“There are efforts within across the nation and even within the city to address our racist past and present when it comes to monuments, squares, names of streets, statues,” she added. “There’s a lot more work we need to do in the city to make sure there is diverse representation.”

Kambon said city officials recommended holding a referendum on the name change, but ballot initiatives can only be put forward as citywide votes. City officials agreed to let the ballot initiative move forward with emphasis placed on what the precincts surrounding Dudley Square decide.

At a glance, the ballot initiative to change the name appeared to have failed with 54% saying no. But a closer look shows the 16 precincts surrounding the commercial district largely backing the proposal.

Now it’s up to the city’s Public Improvement Commission to formally adopt the new name based on the support from residents who live near Dudley Square. Kambon said the matter will be discussed in a Dec. 19 meeting.

“It’s good to see that the people of Boston are able to have that kind of civil compromise, to disagree and still govern themselves in an intelligent way," said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association in Washington, D.C.

Decisions over landmarks with ties to racism tend to be more heated these days. The Texas Preservation Board faced backlash after its members voted unanimously to remove a plaque that states the Civil War was “not a rebellion” or an effort to preserve slavery, the Texas Tribune reported. Efforts to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Capitol, which flew the flag since 1961 in defiance of the Civil Rights movement, were decades in the making before it came down in 2015. Its removal came after Dylann Roof murdered nine members of a historically black church in Charlestown. The flag goes up every year on a plastic pole as part of a protest against its removal.

The Public Improvement Commission, which is tasked with reviewing the Nubian Square campaign, approved a similar name change in 2018. The commission granted the Boston Red Sox’s bid to change Yawkey Way to Jersey Street as the team sought to separate itself from the racist history of former team owner Tom Yawkey. Under Yawkey, the Red Sox was the last Major League Baseball club to integrate.

In Roxbury, Kambon got some resistance to the name change. Some asked why does the name matter. He said he feels the neighborhood should not honor people who, as he puts it, enabled the slave trade.

Others argue that the proposal to rename the area Nubian Square is “misguided.” A Bay State Banner editorial argues that “the problem with that rationale is that the Nubians also had slaves." Another editorial states that locals should be focusing on more pressing issues.

But Richardson, echoing the arguments of Egyptian history scholars, argued that the Nubian empire’s definition of slavery was more akin to servant or laborer rather than the U.S. brand of slavery that relied on skin color.

Who gets remembered in 2019?

Communities across the country are grappling over who gets remembered and how, from statues commemorating those who fought to preserve slavery to the Harvard University Law School shield being changed after complaints that it was based on the family crest of an 18th-century slave owner.

In Boston, residents and politicians are coming to terms with how to reckon with landmarks that are tied to slavery and white supremacy.

Kevin Peterson has led a years-long campaign to rename Faneuil Hall. Its builder and namesake, Peter Faneuil, made his living trading slaves. Instead, he wants to see the hall named in honor of Crispus Attucks, an African American, was the first man killed during the Boston Massacre, a key event that led to the American Revolution.

“It is not simply about changing the name of a building. It is also about changing the conditions in the city, which currently reflect systemic white supremacy,” said Peterson, founder of the Democracy Coalition.

Peterson was pleased to see the Nubian Square ballot initiative pass among Roxbury residents, but added that his campaign aims to spark a larger dialogue about the lack of black-owned businesses in the hall and nearby Quincy Market, among other issues.

Kambon said he is hopeful that the Nubian Square name is the first step of many that will help re-energize the neighborhood, perhaps bringing more black-owned businesses to the square. But the Black Community Information Center is focusing on renaming landmarks whose namesakes are tied to racism.

“Our next goal is to have the station renamed Nubian Station,” Kambon said.

The Nubian Square Coalition will have to take that up with the MBTA and the state, who own the station.

Grossman of the American Historical Association said renaming Dudley Square to Nubian Square or Washington Park to Malcolm X Park, especially when cities have several landmarks named after the nation’s first president, makes sense if residents want to honor a figure who resonates with them or a landmark that more closely reflects their values.

But a broader campaign to rename landmarks that commemorate imperfect historical figures who still made notable contributions raises more complicated questions, he said.

“I think that we’re learning more and more that the whole of American society in many ways was implicated in the 18th and 19th centuries in the slave economy in one way or another,” he said. “Every name in that sense is loaded with all sorts of freight: moral freight, political freight. But on the other hand, are we going to rename everything that was named after someone in the 18th or 19th century?”

There’s a difference, he argues, between honoring Lee whose claim to fame is his role in a war over slavery and honoring George Washington’s role in the American Revolution and his leadership at the birth of the United States.

And when it comes to the Dudley name, he doesn’t believe the name should entirely disappear from the square, either.

“Somehow, there needs to be a record of the fact that this square used to be named after Thomas Dudley and why it’s not anymore,” he said. “I would want to see a plaque saying this is who it used to be named after, and this is why we changed it.”