By Adamaris Gonzalez

Current protests have brought renewed attention and a call to dismantling statues and monuments that are named after white supremacists. District 99 is receiving a portion of the heat with some Cicero residents calling for change.

An online petition is circulating on social media demanding District 99 to rename schools named after individuals who have long been honored despite their white supremacists views and actions. The petition has received over 1,100 signatures.

Photo of petition flyers posted around Cicero, IL calling to rename Cicero Elementary Schools. (Photo by Irene Romulo)

District 99 has a total of sixteen elementary schools. Six of them are named after historical figures who were anti-Black and anti-Indigenous: Woodrow Wilson Elementary, McKinley Elementary, Theodore Roosevelt Elementary, Abraham Lincoln Elementary, Columbus East Elementary, and Columbus West Elementary. Estefania Perez is the Cicero resident and District 99 Wilson Elementary alumna who began the petition with the goal of making a change in her community. She reconnected with elementary friends who she knew would be happy and more than willing to assist her.

“This campaign is not criticizing District 99, it is not a critique on the town and it is not a hateful protest,” Perez said. “We just want the current decision makers to acknowledge the fact that these names are not appropriate anymore and they need assessing. I am open to conversation and I am just trying to make a change in my community.”

Two figures highlighted in the petition are Woodrow Wilson and Christopher Columbus.

Columbus, who has two schools in Cicero named after him, sparked the brutal exploitation of indigenous people in the Americas when he arrived in the 15th century and ushered an era of violent colonization.

Wilson, the 28th president of the United States of America, strictly followed segregationist policies and imposed them all throughout the federal government, according to History.com. Wilson had also praised the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan.

While not explicitly mentioned in the petition, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and William McKinley are national figures who also held racist views. District 99 has a school named after every one of them.

William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States, enforced imperialist and expansionist policies that heavily affected indigenous people by severely thinning their populations and ability to self-govern.

The 26th president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, was also a noted imperialist who strongly believed in a racial hierarchy. In a speech given in 1886 in New York he said, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

Abraham Lincoln, meanwhile, is a tougher case to look at. While the 16th President of the United States did strengthen the path to eliminating slavery, he wasn’t the savior popular history often portrays him as.

On September 18, 1858, at a presidential debate in Charleston, IL, Lincoln publicly confessed severe objections with Black people having the right to vote, hold office, serve on juries and intermarry with white people. “There must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race,” Lincoln said at the debate.

Perez is not the only one to denounce historical figures who committed racial injustices. As protests surge across the country, pressure is growing substantially on authorities to remove monuments and statues that uphold the legacies of the confederacy and colonialism. In St. Paul, Miami, and Boston, statues of Christopher Columbus have been vandalized and demolished. Activists in Boston even took it a step further and completely beheaded a Columbus statue on June 10.

On July 24, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot temporarily removed two statues of Columbus in Chicago after massive protests the week before left dozens injured after Chicago police brutalized protestors.

With the Black Lives Matter protests erupting across the country, Perez says she felt helpless not being able to assist in this movement. Therefore, she took it upon herself to start small and make a change in her own community through the petition.

Perez says another reason she started the petition is to help Cicero residents have their voice heard. According to her, many locals tend to believe they cannot make a difference, even in their small town. Perez believes otherwise and thinks even the smallest changes are important.

“We do not need to disengage from the fight. We can build momentum and address many of these racist issues,” Perez said. “I think the major problem here is that many people are afraid to use the word racist or racism. The word racism should not be a scary word to tackle. It is something that we all need to discuss because we all clearly see it happening in today’s events.”

According to Perez, she is trying to get the attention of District 99 School Board President Thomas M. Tomschin and Town of Cicero President Larry Dominick in hopes of inspiring a community geared solution to actively promote anti-racism.

In an email to Cicero Independiente, Tomschin stated, “We acknowledge that this is an extremely important time in all our lives. As the populous continues to look into collective histories, questions arise regarding the decisions made in the past which are affecting the norms, culture and laws in not only our country, but our state, our county, and even our town.”

“The Board of Education takes the issues raised in the petition seriously and will be reviewing this matter immediately,” he continued.

Perez doesn’t know how long and tedious the process of getting District 99 to rename many of its schools may be, but emphasizes that a main goal of hers is to begin a discussion on matters regarding racism. She knows that the wheel is rolling in the right direction.

“Renaming schools is a simple starter to address the matter at hand,” Perez said.

Adamaris Gonzalez is a student at Morton East High School.