Battle over renaming Concord Middle School heads to a community-wide vote

UPDATE: The Town Meeting voted overwhelmingly in favor of changing the school's name.

Residents of Concord, a place rich with buildings named for famous people across history, are pushing town officials to rename the middle school for a local educator and abolitionist, Ellen Garrison.

It would be the first building named for a Black person in the majority-white town, but the school committee rejected the idea in February, with members arguing that calling it the “Concord Middle School” would be more unifying.

Despite that, Ellen Garrison supporters asked for a community-wide vote on the name at Monday’s annual Town Meeting, saying the Garrison name would send a welcoming message to students and families of color. 

“In the birthplace of our democracy, it would be a bad look to be undemocratic,” said Michael Williams, a Black doctor who raised four biracial children in Concord. “We’re making as much noise as we can.” 

But the naming of the school has driven a deep wedge in this affluent suburb, about 20 miles outside of Boston. Proponents of the change have put up “Why Not Ellen?” signs all across Concord, and said that the vote – even if only symbolic – will be a referendum on the community’s values.  The results could be a major advance or a last gasp in the two-year fight to rename the town’s only public middle school for Garrison. 

Advocates began lobbying the school committee during the merger of two schools and construction of a new $104-million building. The town’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Commission brought the question to a nonbinding vote. Any town resident of voting age is eligible to weigh in, although the school committee is not required to revisit the issue.

School committee members have said the current name was already a big compromise because the new building merged two middle schools with their own names. The committee also received more than 20 proposals for names, other than Garrison’s.

School committee co-chair Alexa Anderson did not respond to a request for an interview, but has called the name unifying.

“‘Concord Middle School’ is a courageous name valuing all voices, all types. [It shows] we value everyone equally,” she said before voting against a change in February. “This idea of elevating one person over another, it just doesn’t seem right.”

Anderson added that buildings across the country are no longer being named for people because the process can be divisive.

That’s a tough sell in Concord, home to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau. Local elementary schools are named after Alcott and Thoreau.

Other proposed names for the middle school included Jerry Moss Middle School, after an influential Black physical education teacher who mentored generations of Concord teens, or naming the school dually for Korean War veteran Thomas Hudner and Jesse Brown, the Black airman he tried to save in combat.

But it is Garrison who has stirred debate. Local historians say she attended Concord public schools and later traveled to Southern states at great personal risk during Reconstruction to teach emancipated children to read. In 1866, she refused to give up her spot at a Baltimore train station and was forcibly removed, nearly a century before Rosa Parks held her ground on an Alabama bus.

Joe Palumbo, a co-chair of the DEI Commission and leader among the “Friends of Ellen,” said Garrison’s grandfather is thought to have fought on Concord’s Old North Bridge as an enslaved person during the Revolutionary War. He called her an unsung heroine.

“Folks love Concord for its history, and a lot of us have been working hard to tell that fuller story. Concord probably had a larger Black population in the 19th century than it did in the 20th and 21st,” Palumbo said. “So we’re trying to make folks aware of that. We also think it makes it a more welcoming and inclusive community when people see themselves in the history of the town.”

Superintendent Laurie Hunter defended the school committee’s decision earlier this month at a Concord Carlisle League of Women Voters forum.

“I heard 22 other names that would be just as valuable to teaching [students about Concord history and values],” Hunter said. “We needed to get to the place where one name united our kids. ... We’re trying to teach a unified culture right now.”

Hunter did not respond to a request for an interview.

When Williams first heard the proposal to name the building for Garrison, he said he “felt seen” and was brought to tears. Reflecting on his own life and career, he said Garrison's name on a building could be a source of inspiration.

“I’ve never been in a room where the people around me wanted me there,” said Williams. “You take up space, you do what needs to be done, and don’t expect that you’re going to make friends. But that’s a big, big weight to put on your kids.”

Other Garrison supporters, who have a website and a petition with more than 1,100 signatures in support of their cause, reject the notion that Garrison’s name would not be unifying. And they said they have concerns that others view it that way.

Garrison supporters told GBH News the change would help educate students about Black history, bravery and local history — as well as help Concord reckon with reported racism in the schools as a community. 

Last fall, the Boston Globe reported that a Black student at the middle school was called a racist slur while playing football with a group of students, one of whom suggested that they whip the teen “because he’s Black.”

Other families told GBH News about ways large and small that they routinely feel unwelcome in Concord. They said Black families taking walks in the town’s predominantly white neighborhoods may be questioned or eyeballed, and some residents get alarmed if they see a group of teens of color.

Megan Denis, who moved to Concord six years ago and has three biracial sons in the town’s schools, said one of her sons in elementary school was called the N-word and “monkey” twice by other students last year.

She said she’s voting in favor of the name change — not because she thinks it will change the community, but because it’s a statement about the town’s values.

“We’ve had a lot of challenges with peer-to-peer racism,” she said, noting that the schools have intervened to her satisfaction, but that she feels there is a bigger problem in the Concord community.

“What I find to be the hardest thing in this community is the lack of understanding,” she said.

The district also hosts 130 METCO students who come to the Concord from Boston daily. Domingos DaRosa, a representative of the METCO parent advisory group to the school committee, expressed support for the Ellen Garrison name in February, saying it would send a welcoming signal to people of color beyond Concord’s borders.

“You’re going to send a wave to Boston, you’re going to send a wave across this whole state,” he said. “Folks are going to take Concord and look at it as an actual true pioneer in [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging].”