National Audubon Society opts to keep enslaver’s name after pressure to drop it
The National Audubon Society, one of the country’s best-known bird conservation organizations, decided in a closed-door vote this week to retain the name of John James Audubon, famed 19th-century naturalist and wildlife illustrator who was also an unabashed enslaver.
The move comes even as about half-a-dozen of the organization’s regional chapters have pledged to scrub his name from their titles, part of a broader reckoning over the U.S. environmental movement’s history of entrenched racism.
The National Audubon Society’s 26-person board of directors voted to retain its current name during a Zoom meeting on Monday after more than a year of deliberating and gathering feedback from both members and outsiders. Susan Bell, chair of the board, declined to provide a breakdown of the final vote.
“The name has come to represent not one person, but a broader love of birds and nature,” Ms. Bell said in a phone interview. “And yet we must reckon with the racist legacy of John James Audubon, the man.”
Yet in a sign of the internal strife, three board members resigned after the organization chose to retain its name, a spokesperson for the group confirmed Wednesday. The official declined to identify the members by name.
Activists in and outside the organization have called upon the group — an influential player in national climate and environmental policy — to jettison Audubon’s name. After months of conducting listening sessions and surveying people in both camps, the national organization’s board of directors decided the moniker is now nearly synonymous with the avian conservation movement - and shouldn’t be abandoned.
“I certainly have been on a learning journey, just like everybody else,” Ms. Bell said. “This process was a healthy one.”
The announcement underscores the challenge of rebuking a racist past while retaining a history that has made “Audubon” a household name associated with protecting birds. The internal debate at Audubon mirrors a broader reassessment of the American environmental movement over race.
Before making its decision, the board commissioned surveys to gauge public opinion. The results showed a “pretty wide range of viewpoints,” Ms. Bell said. “And there was not an overwhelming majority in either direction, which only reinforces the complexity of the decision.”
Still, leaders of some local chapters had urged for a name change, saying the association with Audubon is making it harder to hire high-quality staffers and, ultimately, protect birds.
“Carrying John James Audubon’s name does not serve us well ethically,” Judy Pollock, president of the Chicago chapter, wrote in a letter last month to the national group. “Audubon is not an appropriate standardbearer for our organization.”
The group’s namesake looms large in the world of birds. In the early 19th century, Audubon traveled around the North American wilderness to document the continent’s feathered life.
His vivid paintings of the ivory-billed woodpecker, American flamingo and hundreds of other species culminated in his seminal “Birds of America,” printed between 1827 and 1838.
He died in 1851 a world-famous wildlife artist and ornithologist. Even his critics acknowledge he is the “founding father of American birding.”
Nearly half a century after his death, two Massachusetts women fighting the fashion trend of adorning hats with feathers — and even entire dead birds — leveraged the artist’s legacy by naming their bird conservation group after Audubon.
The national organization, founded in 1905, went on to play a key role managing wildlife refuges, sounding the alarm on the pesticide DDT and campaigning for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. That advocacy helped cement the link between birds and the Audubon brand.
Yet through both his words and his actions, Audubon the man was an unrepentant enslaver and opponent of the abolitionist movement — an aspect of his legacy under scrutiny today.