Chicago school renamed to honor civil rights activist Harriet Tubman

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February 20, 2022

By Associated Press, TheGrio

Harriet Tubman Elementary School unveils new sign

The new sign at Harriet Tubman Elementary School is displayed in Chicago, Monday, Feb. 14, 2022. (Anthony Vazquez/Chicago Sun-Times via AP)

A Chicago elementary school has unveiled a new sign letting people know it is leaving behind the name of a racist and will instead honor a woman known for helping Black people escape slavery, Harriet Tubman.

The sign comes about a year after a group of parents successfully pushed for the school — long named after Swiss American biologist Louis Agassiz — to change its name to the Harriet Tubman Elementary School.

Agassiz was a biologist at Harvard in the 1800s and a proponent of scientific racism who sought to prove Blacks were inferior to other races. Two decades ago, a school committee in Cambridge, Massachusetts, voted to strip his name from a school there and rename it for Maria L. Baldwin, who years earlier was the first Black principal of the school.

The Harriet Tubman Elementary School on Chicago’s North Side joins a long list of schools around the country to be named after the one-time slave who helped Black people to escape slavery in the South via the Underground Railroad in the 1800s.

Read the full story about these activists here.

Learn more about a runaway slave here, or about later activism in the late 20th century here.

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