Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team will change its name to Guardians, the franchise announced Friday, dropping the racially offensive name it has been known as for more than a century.
The change was announced in a video on Twitter narrated by Oscar winner Tom Hanks, who worked in Cleveland early in his acting career and starred in the women’s baseball movie “A League of Their Own.”
The name Guardians is a reference to well-known art deco statues located on the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, which spans the Cuyahoga River and connects downtown Cleveland to the city’s trendy Ohio City neighborhood. Those statues are known as the “Guardians of Traffic.”
The franchise, which announced the name change in a tweet Friday morning, had long faced pressure from activists locally and nationally to ditch the name “Indians,” which critics said was racist. It had been the baseball club’s name since 1915.
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{Matzav.com}