NY group is nixing Audubon

‘Racist’ founder out

They’re bidding it Audubon voyage.

After months of deliberation, New York City Audubon decided to stop using founder John James Audubon’s name for the bird lovers’ group, citing Audubon’s legacy of white supremacy.

The nonprofit will begin a process to develop a new name that “embodies our organizational values” and is “inclusive and welcoming to all New Yorkers,” Executive Director Jessica Wilson wrote in an email to members.

While the group acknowledged that the naturalist’s contributions to art and ornithology are “significant” and fostered “an appreciation of nature and conservation ethos” in the US, it deemed his views and actions toward “people of color and Indigenous people” to be “harmful and offensive.”

While it didn’t list specific problematic views, the naturalist’s family owned enslaved people during the early part of the 19th century and Audubon was also infamously critical of the abolitionist movement on both sides of the pond.

Naturally, the city chapter grappled with the potential cost of ditching the Audubon name for the group, which has amassed 10,000 members since its founding in 1979, The New York Times reported.

The Audubon name also has deep roots in New York City as Audubon and his family lived in the 1840s in what is modern-day Washington Heights.

But Wilson said the group decided that “symbols matter.”

“They matter in our efforts to engage New Yorkers with birds, nature and conservation,” she said.

Karen Benfield, NYC Audubon board president, agreed, saying that to protect dwindling bird populations, “we need wide support, as many voices as possible, and that is not served by having a name that is divisive and has such deeply negative connotations for so many, both within and outside of our organization.”

The parent nonprofit National Audubon Society, though, voted to keep its name last week on the grounds that “the organization transcends one person’s name.”