The settlement of a federal lawsuit will allow the Major League Baseball franchise to move forward with renaming its team, amid a reckoning over symbols of racism.
Call it a shared guardianship. Cleveland’s Major League Baseball franchise and a local roller derby team announced on Tuesday that they had reached a settlement in a naming dispute that had escalated to a federal lawsuit. They will both be called the Guardians. The roller derby Cleveland Guardians sued the baseball team last month in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, accusing it of infringing on its trademark rights and identity as part of a renaming effort that made headlines. The lawsuit contended that the roller derby team had called itself the Cleveland Guardians since 2013 and had registered the name with the Ohio secretary of state in 2017, well before the baseball franchise’s longstanding name, the Indians, was thrust into the middle of a nationwide reckoning over symbols of racism. In a joint statement issued on Tuesday, the two sides said that they were pleased to announce an “amicable resolution” of the lawsuit. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but the compromise is expected to allow the baseball team to move forward with its renaming process, which it announced last December. In July, the franchise said that it had chosen the name the Guardians, a nod to a set of winged Art Deco sculptures known as the Guardians of Traffic on the Hope Memorial Bridge that crosses the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland.
