County opts to honor Black professor, not slave owner

A county in Iowa has cut ties with a slaveowning U.S. vice president for which it had been named, choosing instead to be named for a professor who was the first Black woman to earn a doctorate in the state.

They shared a surname: Johnson.

Johnson County chose Lulu Merle Johnson, who taught history at several historically Black colleges and universities, as its official eponym after a unanimous vote Thursday by the county’s Board of Supervisors. The county, a Democratic bastion, is home to Iowa City and the University of Iowa.

It had been named after Richard Mentor Johnson, the ninth vice president and a Kentuckian who had no known connections to Iowa. He served with President Martin Van Buren, a fellow Democrat, from 1837 to 1841.

Officials said his past as a slave owner who boasted about killing the Shawnee chief Tecumseh during the War of 1812 made him a negative role model and that he did not embody the values of the county’s residents.

Lisa GreenDouglass, a county supervisor who helped write the resolution to change the county’s eponym, said during the board’s meeting in Iowa City that naming something for a person puts them on a pedestal.

“So if we’re going to do that,” she said, “it indeed should be somebody of character who represents those values that we hold dear.”

Johnson County’s reckoning with its identity came amid a national examination of names and symbols associated with slavery and prejudice after George Floyd’s killing last year in police custody.

The measure’s supporters said that Lulu Johnson, who died in 1995, was unquestionably deserving of the honor.

In 1941, she received a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Iowa, becoming the first African American woman in the state to earn a doctorate, according to her biography. She was one of the first Black women in the United States to earn a doctorate in history, said a post on the website of the university, which named a fellowship after her that helps underrepresented minority graduate students.

Johnson taught history at Florida A&M University, West Virginia State College (now West Virginia State University) and what is now Cheyney University in Pennsylvania, where she served as a dean of women’s studies, according to her biography.