Concord Town Meeting members overwhelmingly voted in favor of renaming the middle school after a Black woman and Civil War era abolitionist Ellen Garrison.
Hundreds of Town Meeting members in the majority-white town raised their hand in favor of the Garrison name during a community-wide meeting on Tuesday night. The symbolic two-thirds vote for Garrison — as well as a statement by the Town Select Board showing their support — was a rebuff to a school committee vote in February rejecting the Garrison name in favor of calling the building “Concord Middle School.”
Impassioned residents like Rebecca Kowaloff lined up in the gymnasium and auditorium of the town high school to speak during the meeting.
“This is an opportunity to show our nonwhite students they are part of our community and they are valued,” she said, referring to students of color and the 130 Boston students of color who are educated in Concord through METCO. “Almost certainly, lacking the conviction to take this step will matter to them and it will send a message that I for one do not wish to send.”
The school committee is not required to change the name as a result. School committee supporters said name-change activists were undermining the elected authority of the school committee by bringing the question to a public vote.
“The school committee ran an open and transparent [naming] process,” said resident James Cohane. “The Select Board has inserted themselves into the naming process of the school and sided with a group of well-meaning volunteer citizens rather than siding with the elected officials.”
When asked by residents at the meeting how the school committee would respond, chair Alexa Anderson declined to say what their next steps may — or may not — be regarding the name.
Name change supporter Michael Williams, who raised four biracial children in Concord and is part of the “Friends of Ellen” group agitating for the change, said the group will continue to pressure the school committee.
“To ignore the vote of the town — the same town where a musket shot 250 years ago struck the first blow for American democracy — would be a bad look,” Williams said. This is “part of a continuing story.”
The Concord School Committee meets next on May 7.
