Billy Penn4%
How renaming one Philly street sets the precedent for change 24%
By Violet Comber-Wilen49%
7/23/2026, 10:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 24 faulty reasoning types, including Optimism Bias, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Negativity Bias, with Appeal to Emotion as the most egregious example at 10.4% saturation with 161 hits. Analysis detected 1,268 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,552 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 36.9% and a BS Rank of 24% (15,693 of 20,497 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 76.60% of the article peer group.
When Philly’s City Council voted to pass a bill renaming Taney Street to LeCount Street in 2024 – it was a historic win for many.
Samaya Brown, a community activist who helped advocate for the new street name, remembers where she was when the section of the street running through her block got a new street sign.
“I ran outside with no shoes on, and they unscrewed the sign, and the Taney Street sign fluttered and fell to the ground, and I just like cried as the LeCount sign was going up,” she said.
The street’s current name honors Caroline LeCount, a 19th-century civil rights activist, transit desegregation advocate and educator in Philly.
And the street covers a good part of the city – stretching 30 blocks from South to North Philly.
Now, reflecting almost a year and a half later, Brown said the nearly six-year wait to rename the street was worth it – but difficult at times.
“The thing that I am so proud of us for is that even though it was such a long and arduous process, we did make a framework [to change a street’s name]” she said.
LeCount Street has now become one of the most prolific street name changes in the city, influencing current and future efforts to get street names changed.
To understand the significance of why it was changed and how that affects history moving forward, it’s important to go back.
The street was named for many years after a former U.S.
Supreme Court Chief Justice, Roger B.
Taney – who authored the Dred Scott v.
Sanford decision.
In the decision, Taney ruled that Black people were not citizens, and found that Dred Scott, a slave who had spent part of his life in non-slave territory, could not sue for his freedom.
Philly presumably changed the street’s name to honor Taney a year after the decision was passed in 1858.
And until late 2024, it stayed this way.
Brown was shocked to see this street name when she moved to a new home in Philly.
“I purchased a home up in Brewerytown in 2018 on 27th Street, and I took a walk around the block and looked up and saw Taney Street,” she said.
“I said, ‘You have got to be kidding me!
This can’t be named after who I think it’s named after.’
I went online, looked it up, and found out that it indeed was named after Roger B.
Taney.”
Brown knew this needed to change.
And she was not the first to feel this way either.
In 2017, George Basile, a rising senior at Temple University, posted a petition calling on then-Mayor Jim Kenney and Philly’s City Council to rename the street.
The petition received support, but saw no action for some time.
When Brown was thinking about how to handle the name change in 2020, she connected with Leo Vaccaro – a local schoolteacher.
“Leo reached out to me and said, ‘I think we’re both trying to do the same thing.
Would you like to join?’”
she said.
“So we just kind of combined our efforts together.”
And from there, Vaccaro and Brown found and joined The Rename Taney Coalition – a group combining several neighborhood associations and organizations to advocate for a name change.
Young Chances Foundation, an organization focused on providing positive, peer-motivated experiences for Philly youth, helped to spearhead the initiative.
“[The name change idea] came from us collectively thinking about not just today, but about tomorrow’s mission and how we could not only make an impact on this poor decision, but how we could influence tomorrow’s generation with education and with movements,” said Tyrique Glasgow, the organization’s executive director.
Brown and Glasgow were happy to connect and organize, but say they faced hurdles while pushing to rename the street.
“It took six years to get from the point where we made the initial ask of ‘how do we get this done,’ to City Council, to the point where we actually got it signed into law, and the street needs to be changed,” Samaya said.
“A large portion of that was because there was no official language in how to get that done.”
She explained there wasn’t an official framework for how to change a street’s name.
“We had to do a lot of legwork,” she said.
“We needed to understand what’s going to happen if this name changes, who needs to get the buy-in to change the name, and who needs to be on board.
We did a lot of community outreach, and we did a lot of community paneling.”
Glasgow and Brown, along with other partners, did a lot of work to engage their community during the street renaming process (Violet Comber-Wilen/Billy Penn)
And, the timeline spread over multiple administrations – meaning there were different council members and mayors from the start of the effort through the changes.
“It was trying to navigate two administrations,” Glasgow said.
“We understood each elected office represented a different constituent population.
In some districts, it was a win-win.
But some districts had small pockets who were a little stubborn to change.”
She said the organization walked up and down Taney Street to get neighbors’ opinions, and used community members’ input to decide what the name should be changed to.
In that process, one name kept coming up – Caroline LeCount.
“People were aware that she was Philadelphia’s Rosa Parks, and they were like, ‘How come nobody ever talks about Caroline LeCount?’”
Brown said.
“And then as the process went on, more people were like, ‘Caroline LeCount?
Who’s Caroline LeCount?’
And her name just kept coming up and coming up.”
Caroline LeCount became the name many people wanted to see on Taney Street (Violet Comber-Wilen/Billy Penn)
LeCount was known for her work trying to desegregate SEPTA transportation, being an educator and principal in Philly and helping to support the Union in the American Civil War.
Samaya said it became clear that LeCount’s legacy could be celebrated in this street renaming.
“She really deserves to be a big name, and one thing that makes me so happy is that when we first started this process, and her name was coming up, if you would Google her name, there wasn’t a lot of information on her,” Samaya said.
“There wasn’t a lot of stories on her.
And now, if you Google her name, she’s not a footnote anymore.
She has a narrative.”
After years of meeting with lawmakers, meeting with the public and doing the logistical work behind changes, The Rename Taney Coalition saw victory.
In 2024, the Philadelphia City Council officially renamed the street LeCount Street.
The change took effect in 2025.
Influencing Philly’s future
Moving forward, Brown said she is grateful the coalition worked hard to make this change.
She is hopeful this will help others moving forward.
“If anybody else wants to get involved out there and change a street name, it’s not going to take them six years to get it done,” she said.
“There is going to be a framework.
They can go to their City Council member and say, ‘Hey, here’s something that I need you to do for me,’ and City Council is going to be able to say ‘I can do this for you.’”
Beyond this, Glasgow says the effort has brought further visibility to LeCount’s legacy.
This includes a gravestone for LeCount that the coalition raised money for and a coloring book focusing on LeCount’s life and history.
“All of those things bring awareness and literacy,” he said.
“Just looking at our kids, we can host a camp and just to be able to put that coloring book down there, and they can see someone that’s outside of, the Rosa Parks or the Martin Luther Kings.”
Glasgow said he feels visibility is important right now – especially as the Trump administration has fought to change how the history of people held as slaves by George Washington on Independence Mall is told.
“There’s signs that have been coming down, but, for us to have something that will hopefully stand the test of time is very important,” he said.
And Brown said these actions help hold cities and government officials accountable.
She said it’s important not to just accept what is considered history.
“They wanted to honor Roger B.
Taney,” she said.
“They wanted people to think that the things that he was doing were honorable, and they were not.
And if anybody is trying to tell you that ‘it’s just history’ to have a street name or a building name or anything to be named after somebody, that’s not true.”
Brown acknowledged the process of getting a street name changed in Philly is not cut and dry – but, she hopes her organization has helped make it a bit easier.
“My hope is that not just us, but any member of the community who wants to go and make a change like this, can get that done a lot easier now because of this,” she said.
Glasgow and Brown hope they can continue to inspire communities, throughout Philly and nationwide (Violet Comber-Wilen/Billy Penn)
The post How renaming one Philly street sets the precedent for change appeared first on Billy Penn at WHYY .
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