Many Brent Elementary students, parents and teachers didn’t know a decade ago that their school was named after D.C.’s first mayor. Or that namesake Robert Brent was pro-slavery and helped enact the Black Codes — laws banning Black people from being on the street after 10 p.m. in the city and requiring freedmen to carry their papers at all times.
Upon finding out in 2018, a group of them started talking about changing the school’s name to honor someone who embodied their values of bravery, empathy and action. Last spring, they chose Gardner Bishop, a Black civil rights activist who in the 1940s and ’50s led the charge to integrate the city’s public schools.
This week, Brent parents, a teacher and a student pushed D.C. lawmakers to pass legislation that would do just that. The bill introduced in September by council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6) appears to be on a glide path to win approval from the council and Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) before heading to Congress for review.
Billy Schutte-Pratt, a 9-year-old fourth-grader at Brent, told council members he wants his school to highlight someone people can be proud of.
“They won’t think of a racist White guy,” Billy said. “They’ll think of a parent who saw a problem and — instead of accepting it, thinking there was nothing to be done — he took action, he helped others.”
The possible renaming comes as the country continues a battle over which historical figures to publicly honor and the version of American history that should be conveyed by doing so.
During his first term, for example, President Donald Trump fought the renaming of military installations, including Fort Bragg Army base in North Carolina. He vowed to veto legislation that would do so, but Congress passed it anyway with a bipartisan, veto-proof majority.
Last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reversed the decisionto rename Fort Bragg as Fort Liberty, but said it would now honor Roland L. Bragg, a World War II paratrooper, not Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, the plantation owner who enslaved people.
A working group of Brent parents considered the same kind of change that Hegseth did with Fort Bragg — keeping the “Brent” title but switching who it was named after, Andrew Pratt, Billy’s father, said in an interview. Members decided that while the measure might make some members of the Brent community feel good, it wouldn’t properly address the school’s association with a pro-slavery racist.
But naming it after Bishop would, he said.
Born in 1909, Bishop moved from North Carolina to D.C. in his early 20s, opened up a barbershop a decade later and settled into a working-class life in the city, according to the D.C. Historic Preservation Office.
His oldest daughter, Judine, attended Browne Junior High, an all-Black school that in 1947 was woefully overcrowded. Rather than desegregate the nearby White high schools, which had space, the D.C. school board forced Browne’s students to attend classes in shifts, receiving less than the full day of legally required instruction. Eventually, the school board moved students to two outdated, abandoned White elementary schools, making Browne’s students walk up to two miles round trip and cross a major street to attend classes.
“Gardner Bishop was outraged,” Jenny Cheek, Brent’s former PTA co-president, told council members at a Tuesday hearing. “He would not accept the unequal education being offered to his daughter and other Black children in the District.”
Bishop rallied other parents to form the Consolidated Parents Group and boycott the school, leading the board to find a space that was closer. Two years later, Bishop led parents to try to enroll Black students at the new junior high in Southeast Washington reserved for White students but was turned away, resulting in a lawsuit. The campaign culminated in the 1954 Supreme Court decision Bolling v. Sharpe, which mirrored Brown v. Board of Education and integrated the District’s public schools.
Brent’s parents wanted to rid themselves of their namesake long before they settled on a replacement, Pratt said. They were inspired in 2018 when the predominantly Black student body at another elementary school named after a former D.C. mayor, who was an enslaver, successfully pushed to rename it after a principal who led the school for two decades.
The renaming push at Brent got momentum in 2020 when Bowser convened a working group to evaluate government-owned property in the District to determine “if the person the facility is named for is inconsistent with DC values and in some way encouraged the oppression of African Americans and other communities of color or contributed to our long history of systemic racism.”
The group recommended officials rebrand four places named after Robert Brent, including the elementary school in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.
The pandemic delayed those efforts, and once Brent’s parents learned the school was going to be torn down and rebuilt, they decided to hold off so that the name change could align with the renovation.
“That seemed like the perfect opportunity to rechristen it,” Cheek said.
In February, they circulated surveys asking for suggestions for a new school name, which returned 57 submissions, Brent parent Megan Brackett said. The school working group whittled the options to eight. Then more than three dozen faculty members narrowed that short list to two potential namesakes: Bishop and Elizabeth Catlett, a D.C. native and prominent Black artist in the mid-20th century, Brackett said.
More than 700 students, parents and graduates voted in May. The results: Bishop edged out Catlett, 378 votes to 339.
Billy cast his ballot for Bishop last spring. On Tuesday, he urged council members to do the same.
“If our school’s name was Gardner Bishop Elementary, people would imagine a hero,” Billy told lawmakers, “a person who saw the suffering of others and instead of looking away, he worked hard to correct it — to help any and every student.”
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