A Raleigh Neighborhood Ditched Its Slave-Owning Namesake. Some Are Still Fighting to Keep It.

The neighborhood known either as Cameron Park or Forest Park, depending which side of the debate you’re on, is one of Raleigh’s oldest and stateliest. 

Tucked off of Hillsborough Street, it’s a patchwork of genteel Colonial and Queen Anne-style homes situated on ample lawns and shaded by oaks, ashes, and elms. Most of the 800 or so residents are wealthy and liberal. Some are politicians and university chancellors. The vibe is friendly: People know their neighbors. They hang out at the bar down the street. They barbecue together.

“When we moved here, the first few days, we literally had to start spying out our windows,” recalls Joel Lutterman, president of the Forest Park Neighborhood Association.

“Neighbors were stopping by to talk to us and we couldn’t get any work done.”

The neighborhood has an active listserv that serves as a forum for party invitations, furniture giveaways, and the occasional spirited hyperlocal argument. In early 2021, it lit up with discussion about whether Cameron Park should change its name due to its namesake’s connection to slavery. 

Over the next five years, the debate would cleave the otherwise close-knit, politically homogeneous community into two factions, each claiming to have history, the law, and racial politics on their side. 

A series of surveys and votes culminated in a decision to rename the neighborhood Forest Park in 2022. Then last year, six neighbors filed a lawsuit claiming the name-change process had been flawed and should be deemed invalid. And although they voluntarily dismissed their suit this spring, they say they plan to bring it back.

The plaintiffs plan to again ask the court to declare that the neighborhood association’s renaming process was improper, said their lawyer Robin Tatum. And they’ll ask the court to clarify the procedure for how the neighborhood could legally change its name.

The INDY spoke to neighbors, current and former neighborhood association presidents, and the lead plaintiff on the lawsuit and combed through court records and emails to understand why this debate still hasn’t been put to rest. A majority of people seem to have accepted the change and moved on. But a vocal minority refuses to let it die.

The Cameron Legacy

Born in 1777, Duncan Cameron was a judge, state lawmaker, and University of North Carolina trustee. He and his family owned thousands of acres of plantations and more than 1,000 slaves. 

He also owned the land that became Cameron Park. This land was never a plantation, and he leased some of it to the Episcopal School of North Carolina, which became Saint Mary’s School. By the 1900s, developers had acquired the land and planned a suburb for the growing and industrializing capital city. A wave of new upper-middle-class professionals needed somewhere to live. 

Early advertisements for the neighborhood courted upper-middle-class businessmen, government officials, professors, and lawyers, seeking to solidify their rising socioeconomic status with a prestigious address. 

“Everyone who is familiar with Raleigh recognizes that Cameron Park enjoys the best social conditions available to our city,” one 1914 ad promised. “There are no poor sections. There are no bad approaches. In fact, there is nothing that any one need apologize for in any way.”

But the neighborhood achieved its rarefied reputation in an ugly way. Among the irreproachable “social conditions” that made it desirable for early residents were racist covenants that excluded Black residents.

In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially restrictive covenants were unenforceable. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned them outright. But Raleigh’s residential segregation persisted, and the neighborhood remains overwhelmingly white to this day.

A Neighborhood Vote

After George Floyd’s killing and the racial justice protests of 2020, Raleigh’s Cameron Village shopping center and Cameron Village Regional Library changed their names to the Village District and Oberlin Regional Library, respectively. Several months later, some Cameron Park neighbors began to wonder if they should follow suit.

In February 2021, the Cameron Park Neighborhood Association’s executive committee formed a nine-person committee to explore the possibility of changing the neighborhood’s name. Three members supported keeping the name, three supported changing it, and three were undecided. The committee brought in historians and civil rights advocates to make the case for and against the name change. 

At one resident forum, a historian shared archival evidence of violence, sexual assaults, and family separations committed against people enslaved by the Cameron family. In one primary-source account, an enslaved man named James Curry described how Duncan Cameron himself “used to carry a large cane, and if he met a Black man on the road and he did not raise his hat and bow to him, he would beat him with his cane.”

Another historian countered that Cameron Park has been a neighborhood for longer than it was owned by the Camerons, and that Cameron is one of many place names in Raleigh that come from slaveholders. The name Cameron Park now stands for a century of neighborhood history unrelated to the family, she said.

The naming committee surveyed residents on whether to even consider a name change; according to the neighborhood association’s’s records, a majority of the 250 survey respondents said they wanted to.

In September 2021, the neighborhood association held an up-or-down vote on the name change. Its bylaws state that “issues shall be determined by a simple majority of [neighborhood] members present and voting except when related to adoption or amendment of these bylaws,” leading the executive committee to conclude that a simple majority of votes cast would be sufficient for a name change. 

All full-time residents over 18 were eligible to vote—roughly 600 people, the neighborhood association estimated. They offered in-person, absentee, and online voting options. Volunteers from the pro- and anti-Cameron Park camps helped count the ballots to ensure fairness. The final tally was 240-201 in favor of renaming—not a landslide, but enough to proceed.

In March 2022, the neighborhood association held a second vote to choose a new name. It used a ranked-choice ballot to select from four options. The admittedly bland “Forest Park” won. 

Then the neighborhood association set about implementing the change. It contacted the city of Raleigh and companies like Google, Apple, and Wikipedia. It filed an Assumed Name or “Doing Business As” (DBA) certificate with the Wake County Register of Deeds to change its own name to the Forest Park Neighborhood Association. The name “Cameron Park” would still appear on the neighborhood association’s bylaws, but it would refer to itself everywhere else as Forest Park.

In 2024, the Raleigh City Council voted to update the Cameron Park Neighborhood Conservation Overlay District, a special zoning designation, to reflect the new name. It was reported at the time that this was “the last city document” with the name Cameron Park on it. During the public hearing ahead of the vote, Forest Park resident Holning Lau said 14 residents of color, including “every single Black resident and almost every Asian-American neighbor I know of,” had co-written a statement in support of renaming. (The INDY wasn’t able to reach any of Forest Park’s Black residents for this story.)

“We’re not so naive to think that renaming our neighborhood will protect our children from racism, but the name change has been a powerful, uplifting symbol reminding our families that the community around us reflects hope and change for the better,” said Lau, who is Asian American. 

The council agreed to update the zoning designation in a 7-1 vote. Only then-Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin opposed the motion, citing a lack of consensus in the neighborhood and a desire not to expose the city to a lawsuit. 

A year later, in October 2025, six neighbors filed a lawsuit against the neighborhood association asserting that its voting methodology had been flawed and the name change was invalid. The suit describes how some residents had wished to distance their neighborhood from the Camerons.

“Other residents,” the complaint continued, “took a different approach and were concerned about the importance of preserving, rather than erasing, the history of one of the State’s oldest historical neighborhoods – including its original name. Although just as committed to racial justice as the name change proponents, this group did not believe that renaming Cameron Park was a wise or effective method to achieve this goal.”

The plaintiffs argue the neighborhood association should have required a two-thirds margin to approve the name change instead of a simple majority. 

“These bylaws may be amended by a vote of 2/3 of the members present and voting at a meeting called for the purpose of amending these bylaws,” the bylaws state. They were never amended and still refer to the neighborhood and neighborhood association as Cameron Park. 

The plaintiffs, including Myrick Howard, a resident of almost 50 years, see the DBA certificate as a bad-faith loophole the neighborhood association’s leaders used to push the name change through without a two-thirds vote to change the bylaws. The neighborhood association countered that the DBA certificate was simply the most effective way to carry out the will of a majority of voting neighbors, and changing the neighborhood association bylaws is unnecessary to change the name of the neighborhood. 

But arguments about voting technicalities are secondary to the pro-Cameron Park camp’s assertion that the renaming was unnecessary and misguided to begin with.

In May, the plaintiffs agreed to voluntarily dismiss their lawsuit without prejudice rather than enter into an arduous and expensive discovery process where they would have had to produce years’ worth of emails and documents. But they left the door open to refiling, which they now say they intend to do.

Virtue Signaling or a Lost Cause?

Howard recently retired as president of Preservation North Carolina, a respected nonprofit dedicated to protecting and restoring historic buildings around the state.

The lawsuit’s first named plaintiff and the most outspoken, Howard said he believes that renaming Cameron Park was about virtue signaling rather than having a real racial reckoning.

“This is a way that some white folks who support racial justice can feel better about their neighborhood, which is lily white,” he said, adding that the vote was “a meaningless gesture that does nothing to help, except to make people feel better about themselves.”

Howard said he’d like to do something more substantive like create a neighborhood scholarship fund for minority students. Residents could donate 1% of their assessed property value over a five-year period, he proposed.

“That would move the needle way more than changing a name,” he said.

Howard also says the Cameron legacy is more varied than some of his neighbors admit. 

“I call it bumper sticker history,” he said. “If you can boil it down to one sentence, you’ve got it wrong. In this case, Duncan Cameron [was] a complex person.”

Howard has debated neighbors on this for years now.

“People said to me, ‘I don’t understand how you can sleep, knowing that this was part of the Cameron plantation,’” he said. “I’m thinking, ‘Well, it wasn’t part of Cameron plantation, but can you sleep at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City? Because slavery was all over this country.’”

Other supporters of the Cameron Park name did not reply to the INDY’s interview requests. 

Howard said he and his five co-plaintiffs have raised about $31,000 from between 15 and 20 neighbors to cover their legal expenses, and plan to modify their argument in their forthcoming suit. 

But almost every other neighbor the INDY spoke to insists the plaintiffs are fighting for a lost cause. 

Joel Lutterman and Michael Lindsay, the current president and immediate former president of the neighborhood association, said the plaintiffs represent a small minority of neighbors who haven’t accepted the results of the renaming process.

“The vast majority … has moved on and wants this issue to go away,” Lindsay wrote in an email. “I say that as a person who argued for keeping the Cameron Park name and voted that way.” 

Richard “Gus” Gusler has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years and owns the Players Retreat, a popular neighborhood hangout. He hadn’t heard of the original lawsuit until the INDY asked him what he thought about it.

“I sit and talk with all the neighborhood people that come into the PR, and [the name change] has not come up in any discussion I’ve had with anybody. Period,” Gusler said. 

“I was very happy with changing the name. Do I like [the name] Forest Park? Not particularly. … But for me, any name’s better than having that man’s name on the neighborhood I live in … and I’ve never really gotten into any arguments about it.”

Ron Aycock is a retired lawyer who has lived here for about 25 years. He felt the name change process was “comprehensive, fair, and in compliance with rules. There was an intensive discussion period online and in person. Folks were given the opportunity to express their opinion. Voting was done on a very adequate basis, so I think the controversy should be over.”

Aycock said he regularly attends neighborhood get-togethers and the name change debate never comes up. At this point, he said, it’s “a controversy engendered by a few and not cared about by the many.”

That may be true, but hard feelings persist. In late May, when the Cameron Park contingent dismissed its lawsuit, the listserv was once again aflurry with commentary, including a letter from the plaintiffs’ lawyer to the neighborhood association’s lawyer describing several “concessions” they feel they extracted in the lawsuit related to the neighborhood association’s legal name still being Cameron Park. Eventually, the listserv moderator stepped in. 

“Renewing the name-change debate of 2021-2022 on this listserv will destroy it,” the moderator wrote.

Just last week, residents attempted to relitigate the renaming during a neighborhood association meeting held on Zoom. Lindsay recapped the renaming process, and Howard explained that he intends to bring back his lawsuit. The conversation quickly devolved.

“Myrick, you are destroying this neighborhood,” one resident commented in the Zoom chat, which the INDY viewed. “We voted. We decided. Please let it go.”

“It is the defamatory statements made by Mike L that are destroying the neighborhood,” another resident replied, referring to Lindsay.

People on both sides of the naming debate have supported their positions with historical and legal arguments. But at the end of the day, names are social constructs. So are neighborhoods, whose boundaries are invented, blurry, and changeable. What is on the deeds and maps doesn’t matter as much as what people actually call it.

“The [neighborhood] Association does not believe any court has the authority to reverse the neighborhood name change,” the defendants’ lawyer, Neil Riemann, wrote in an email to the INDY.

So what do the majority of residents call the place they live? Predictably, accounts differed.

“There are still some people that, when they refer to the neighborhood in either the listserv or in flyers that we put under people’s doormats announcing one thing or another, still refer to the neighborhood as Cameron Park,” Lutterman said. “To me that’s … I won’t say immature exactly, but it’s like, come on. … It’s time to move on.”

Howard is firm: It’s Cameron Park.

Comment on this story at [email protected].