Chicago Public Schools Finally Dropping Names of Racist White Men From Its Buildings
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There’s a long list of schools, colleges, and universities across the country that are named after racist and controversial figures. Thankfully, some institutions have started to right those wrongs over the years and change the names of those schools and buildings.
Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is next in line, having recently announced it’s changing the names of three elementary schools named after three white men — U.S. President James Monroe, Supreme Court Justice Melville Fuller and Christopher Columbus — according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Monroe was the fifth president of the United States, serving from 1817 to 1825, and he owned more than 200 enslaved Africans during his life, according to the White House Historical Association. James Monroe Elementary School was built in his honor.
Fuller was a Supreme Court Justice who assisted in upholding segregation in this country with the 1896 ruling Plessy vs. Ferguson. Melville Fuller Elementary was named after him.
Columbus, who is falsely known for being the “founder” of the Americas, is also one of the worst villains in this country’s history, as he also practiced slavery nearly a century before the Atlantic slave trade started. Christopher Columbus Elementary School was named after him.
While CPS is taking the initiative to remove the names of these three men from their elementary schools, a lot of work still needs to be done.
More from the Chicago Sun-Times:
They make nine schools that have been renamed since a Chicago Sun-Times investigation in 2020 found 30 schools were named for slaveholders, and schools named after white people — mostly men — outnumbered those named for African Americans by 4-1, Latinos 9-1 and Indigenous people 120-1.
Those are numbers that can’t be denied, especially when more than 82 percent of students attending schools in CPS are either Black or Latino.
Per the report from the Sun-Times, a year ago, CPS started a new process for schools wanting to change their name: They mustsubmit a request to the district, take students’ opinions into account, share a plan, and then vote on a name.
