Swinney says he’ll lead an effort to change the names first at those schools named for anyone involved in slavery, with people of color at the center of the discussions. And, for me, it’s important that all of this work be through a process that really starts to teach what this history really means, that starts to reckon with racist ideas and that helps people to really have conversations with race that are not generally happening outside of friend circles.” “And we got to disrupt it, we got to stop it, we got to change it. “It’s dehumanizing, and it’s something that we have to work on and change,” says Maurice Swinney, the top CPS official for racial equity. Now, amid the nationwide racial reckoning sparked by the violent death of George Floyd, an African American man whose death in late May was caught on camera as a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, Chicago school officials say they are reviewing school names and that changes will be made. The couple donated money for its new building. One public school - a government-funded but privately run charter school - is named for an Asian American woman and her Italian American husband. They also say they didn’t realize before being asked about those findings regarding the nation’s third-largest public school system, in which nine of 10 children identify as Black, Brown or indigenous, that schools named for white people outnumber those named for African Americans by a ratio of four-to-one, Latinos by nine-to-one and indigenous people by more than 120-to-1. One South Side elementary school in Washington Heights that’s named for Washington’s plantation - where hundreds toiled in bondage - today has a student population that’s 98.7% Black.Ĭhicago Public Schools officials say they weren’t aware of how many schools remain named for slaveholders until shown the Sun-Times’ findings. Others, perhaps surprisingly to some, were Northerners - like John Hancock, William Penn and Alexander Hamilton. Some, like Marshall, were Southern plantation owners, among them Presidents George Washington and James Madison. ProvidedĪcross the city, at least 30 public schools are named for people who owned or traded enslaved Black or indigenous people, according to a Chicago Sun-Times review of every public school name in Chicago. He’s one of the people that was a slave owner.”Īnyiah Jackson-Williams, valedictorian of John Marshall Metropolitan High School, was shocked to learn the school’s namesake owned slaves. “That’s our heritage,” says Anyiah Jackson-Williams, Marshall’s valedictorian from the class of 2020.
That part of Marshall’s history didn’t keep an all-white Chicago Board of Education from naming the school on West Adams Street in East Garfield Park for him when it opened 125 years ago. Marshall also was a slaveholder his entire adult life, with at least 200 Black slaves on his Virginia plantations. It’s named for the fourth chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, widely regarded as the most influential leader of the nation’s highest court, honored with his face on postage stamps and his name on law schools in Chicago and elsewhere. One of the city’s oldest public high schools - once heavily Jewish and for decades home to a nearly all-Black student body - it boasts fiercely proud alumni and a reputation for powerhouse athletics. John Marshall Metropolitan High School is a West Side institution.
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