Audubon Society Rejects Union’s Petition to Change Name Away from Slave-Owning Namesake Naturalist
21:19 GMT 15.03.2023 (Updated: 21:28 GMT 15.03.2023)
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The nationwide protests in 2020 sparked by the killings of Black citizens at the hands of US police ushered in a reckoning with the enduring legacies of the country’s past, which includes Native American genocide and African slavery. Numerous institutions were renamed so as to no longer honor those who participated in those horrid affairs.
After facing employee pressure to change its name, the National Audubon Society announced on Wednesday it would continue to be named after John James Audubon, a 19th century conservationist and slave owner.
The bird conservation organization said it arrived at the decision after “a lengthy process to examine its name in light of the personal history of its namesake.”
“The name has come to represent not one person, but a broader love of birds and nature,” Susan Bell, the chair of Audubon's 27-member board, told US media. “And yet we must reckon with the racist legacy of John James Audubon, the man.”
The society also announced the creation of a $25 million fund for diversity, equity and inclusion over the next five years, and that it would not hide Audubon’s “problematic legacy” and the inequalities “inherent in the conservation movement.”
The proposal had been made by the Bird Union, the National Audubon Society’s staff union, which decided last month to drop Audubon’s name and called on the society to join them in doing so. Following the society’s decision, the union slammed the board of directors for showing a lack of interest in “following through on their commitments to cultivate a fair and equitable workplace.”
“Their decision to double down on celebrating a white supremacist and to continue to brand our good work with his name actively inflicts harm on marginalized communities, including members of our union who for too long have been excluded from the environmental movement,” the union said.
It rejected the society’s diversity, equity and inclusion commitment, saying that “we have heard many empty promises and declarations from [CEO Elizabeth] Gray, and have rarely seen this commitment carried out at the bargaining table.”
Several regional chapters made the name change as early as 2021, calling on Gray to drop the name from the national organization as well because it “does not serve us well ethically.”
Naturalist and Slave Owner
The French-American artist and naturalist is known for his vast documentation of North American birds and his dedication to producing lifelike artistic representations of them. He was born to a French naval officer and his chambermaid mistress on a plantation in modern-day Haiti, which was then a French colony driven by the labor of African slaves.
While his father sold the plantation and went to fight in the American War of Independence, John was sent to be educated in France. He later came to the US as an adult, settling in Kentucky, where he bought nine African slaves.
In 1834, he wrote to his wife, Lucy Bakewell Audubon, that the United Kingdom had “acted imprudently and too precipitously” in emancipating Black slaves in its West Indian colonies the year prior.
History has also recorded that Audubon on several occasions desecrated the graves of Mexican and Native Americans, collecting their skulls to be used in craniometric experiments by Samuel George Morton, an anatomy professor at Pennsylvania Medical College. Morton measured the volume of the skulls as part of an effort to prove that nonwhite races had inferior brain sizes to whites - a 19th century pseudoscience known as “race science.”
Nationwide Reckoning
The National Audubon Society is far from the only organization to face such pressures in recent years. Myriad such conversations began during the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, which were sparked by the police murder of the 46-year-old Black man in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and several other similar instances earlier that year.
While the demonstrations failed to achieve major policy changes, it did result in a widespread cultural reckoning with how the nation has remembered and even glorified people who orchestrated or participated in the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans.
Numerous monuments to such figures, including especially leaders of the 1860s pro-slavery rebellion that called itself the Confederacy, were removed, and institutions from schools to highways and even military installations were renamed.
However, the effort also sparked major backlash, which detractors denouncing it as “cancel culture” and opening a battle against what they called “woke” ideology that has since grown to encompass objections to LGBTQ rights as well.
