After voting in August to remove the name of a racist scientist from their school, the Agassiz Elementary School’s Local School Council has settled on three finalists for a new name.
The finalists, ranked in order of the LSC members’ preference, are:
Harriet Tubman Elementary, named for the abolitionist who repeatedly risked her own life to guide enslaved people to freedom on the Underground Railroad.
Katherine Johnson Elementary, named for the mathematician whose orbital mechanics calculations for NASA contributed to numerous space missions, including John Glenn’s. Johnson died a year ago at 101.
Rosa Parks Elementary, named for the civil rights leader who, among other things, helped ignite the Montgomery Bus Boycott when she refused to give up her seat to a white man in 1955.
The Chicago Board of Education will choose a name from the three finalists at its March 24 meeting.
Efforts to change the school’s name date back several years, but a group of parents and alums called CARE, Chicagoans for Anti-Racist Education, renewed the push last summer, arguing it was demeaning and unacceptable to educate children under the name of Louis J. Agassiz, a Swiss biologist whose long-discredited teachings about race were used to dehumanize Black people and justify slavery.
“Our plan is to raise voices and awareness that there is a CPS school, that has as half of its population nonwhite children and a significant Black population, that has the name of a racist on it,” Agassiz parent and LSC member Tina Holder King told me in July. “We’re hoping that awareness will make it even more crystal clear than it already should be that the name needs to be removed.”
Agassiz lived from 1807 to 1873. He worked as a professor at Harvard University and is celebrated for his contributions to the study of natural science. He also believed and argued that Black people were a “degraded and degenerate race” and strongly opposed interracial marriage. His teachings, which held that African and African American people were genetically distinct from and inferior to white people, were repeatedly used to justify slavery.
“The anti-Blackness we see today is so much more evident to so many more people,” parent Chirag Mehta said this summer, explaining the renewed efforts to remove the name. “It’s easier for people to see the trajectory of how you get from a person like Agassiz, trying to use science to justify racist ideologies, to where we are today.”
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“He was an important figure in laying the groundwork for the anti-Blackness that fueled the anti-abolitionist movement, that fueled the backlash against Reconstruction, that fueled the Jim Crow era,” Mehta said. “He played a pivotal role in providing pseudoscientific justification for a lot of the racism we see and experience today. He wielded power as a scientist, and he used that to provide cover and justification for white supremacy. That they put his name on a school, an institution of education, is all the more reason for us to interrogate his history. And it’s all the more reason for us to take the name off the school.”
In August, the LSC voted 7-4 to move ahead with a proposal that would have students research new names and present a list of 20 options — one per homeroom — to the LSC, who would then whittle the list down to three to send to the Chicago Board of Education.
Holder King said she’s “extremely happy” with the three finalists and hopes to see Harriet Tubman Elementary chosen as the new name.
“Slavery has been such the burden of Black people in this country to bear alone,” she said. “The only time it is fed to wider audiences is in movies that tend to glorify the white hero and tend to dilute the savagery and ugliness and harm of slavery. So I think having Harriet Tubman as the name of this school helps rectify that and is a small step in changing that culture.”
Holder King said she thinks the name change will be accompanied by curriculum and events that would educate the school community about the life and accomplishments of its eventual namesake.
“Harriet Tubman’s story is a huge nod to what Black people are capable of, as far as perseverance,” she said. “All that was going on and this is what she did, and the humanity of her going back to save her people. I think it would help put slavery into the conversation, and into conversations about the impact on society even when slavery ended. It would help start those conversations that are so long overdue and should be common knowledge in American history, not just Black history.”
I love that the process to choose the new name has already launched and sustained some of those crucial conversations among Agassiz’s students, who were the ones, after all, to come up with the three names.
In a school year marred by physical distance, human loss and contentious debates over reopening plans, this feels like a much-needed, much-deserved win for progress, and, more importantly, for students — who will no longer have to explore and research and problem solve and create under the heading of a man whose flawed teachings caused harm to humanity.
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