What’s in a name?
Here’s the story behind Anne Arundel schools named for people
Educators, a poet, generals and even a Founding Father: A handful of Anne Arundel County schools are named for people.
Last week, the Anne Arundel Board of Education decided one of them was no longer worthy of the honor.
The board unanimously voted to remove former superintendent George Fox’s name from a Pasadena middle school, citing his racist opposition to equal pay for Black teachers in the 1930s.
But what about the rest? Some of the names are figures whose stories are tied to the same history of segregated education in Anne Arundel County. Some were historic figures, others were beloved members of the community.
Walter Mills, the man who challenged Fox’s racism in a landmark lawsuit, is memorialized at Mills-Parole Elementary school in Annapolis. He arrived at the segregated school for Black students in 1942, and established a career as a groundbreaking educator and civil rights activist who took over the segregated school for Black children.
In 1939, he successfully sued Anne Arundel County Board of Education for equal pay for Black principals and teachers. His lawyer was Thurgood Marshall, then a lawyer with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and later a Supreme Court justice. Marshall is the subject of a memorial at Lawyer’s Mall, and BWI Thurgood Marshall is named for him.
In 1994, the community asked the school system to rename the renovated Parole Elementary in his honor: the Walter S. Mills-Parole Elementary School.
There was a similar affection for a 19th-century teacher in Galesville.
Today, the Carrie Weedon Elementary School has been repurposed as Carrie Weedon Early Education Center. It is one of three schools named for women who worked as teachers in Anne Arundel County.
Young Carrie Sanks came to the tiny south county village in the 1880s to teach at what was then a one-room school. She married Thomas Weedon, dockmaster for the steamship landing, and spent the rest of her life there.
The couple didn’t have any children, and their house is now home to the Galesville Historical Society.
The current building was built in 1961, and Dorothy Whitman, a board member of the heritage society, said it was a clear choice to name it for Weedon. It later became the first school to be integrated in rural south county.
Weedon herself was a groundbreaker in her own right.
“She was the first married principal, you weren’t supposed to be married and teaching at the time, in Anne Arundel County,” Whitman said. “She taught here for 30 years.”
Perhaps the best-known school named for an individual in the county is no longer a school. Wiley Bates went from being enslaved in North Carolina to the wealthiest Black man in Annapolis by the time he died on April 1, 1935.
Bates was a founding member of the PTA at Stanton High School, the first high school for Black students in Anne Arundel County. When the student population outgrew that campus, he donated money to purchase land for a new building. That school opened in 1933 and it was named in his honor.
Today, the building is the Wiley H. Bates Heritage Park, home to a youth center, legacy center and homes for the elderly.
Folger McKinsey had one of the most unusual jobs in journalism, a poet who wrote a daily newspaper column.
His work appeared in The Baltimore Sun for 42 years, starting in 1906. A protégé and friend of Walt Whitman, he wrote often about his city throughout his career. His 1906 poem, “Baltimore, Our Baltimore” won a contest for the city anthem.
He died at his home on the Magothy River in 1950 and is buried in St. Margaret’s Cemetery near Annapolis. The elementary school named for him in Severna Park was built three years later.
There was similar speed in naming an elementary school in Glen Burnie for George T. Cromwell.
Born on Oct. 23, 1892, on his family’s farm in Ferndale, Cromwell served a long career in public office: county commissioner, state senator, register of wills, clerk of the county court, chief tax assessor, customs collector at the Port of Baltimore and on the county Board of Education.
He died in 1964, and two years later, the new school and was named for him.
When Harman Elementary opened in 1933, the threeroom school for Black children was named for the family who donated the land. Frank Hebron was there as a student, and then returned after graduate school to teach and work as the principal when a new school was built in 1955. Seven
years later, he became a supervisor of county schools.
Although he died in 2001, his wife Irene was there in 2007 to watch the school dedicated her husband’s name: Frank Hebron-Harman Elementary School.
“In spirit, he’ll be there,” Hebron said at the dedication. “He’d be delighted, laughing and raving, and he would have to see everybody as usual.”
Several elementary schools are named for the communities around them, which in turn are named for people.
Jones Elementary School opened in 1871 as a segregated schoolroom for Black students and has moved several times. Like several surrounding community names, it is named for shop keeper Paul Jones, part of an established local family.
The same links to community names exist for Jacobsville, Tracys Landing, Shipley’s Choice and even Annapolis elementary schools— named for the city named for Queen Anne of England.
Three schools at Fort George G. Meade are named for military figures Pershing Hill is named for Gen. John Pershing, commander of U.S. troops in Europe during World War I. Like the post itself, Meade Elementary is named for the Civil War Union commander at Gettysburg, Gen. George Meade. Ridgeway Elementary is named for Mathew Ridgeway, the U.S. general who commanded troops in both World War II and the Korean War.
Only one school in the county is named for a Founding Father, and that one is from Virginia.
Richard Henry Lee Elementary School in Glen Burnie is named for a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Lee was a member of the Virginia Lees, his nephew was Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and is known for introducing the resolution in June 1776 that led directly to the Declaration.
Another historic figure is recognized at Van Bokkelen Elementary in Severn.
The Rev. Libertus Van Bokkelen, a Protestant Episcopal priest who was appointed as the first state superintendent of public instruction in November 1864, days after Maryland’s new state constitution outlawed slavery.
As historian Janice Hayes Williams wrote in 2005, he was a leading proponent of education for children of newly freed Black Marylanders.
“The colored population in this state have shown their interest in building up schools for their children; however, there is not at present a willingness to educate colored children at public expense. This I do not understand. Why are there skeptics?” he said in his first report to the General Assembly.
It did not go over well. Local opposition from whites resulted in the Maryland Constitutional Convention of 1867, which eliminated the position and ousted Van Bokkelen.
Out of office, Van Bokkelen encouraged a growing number of schools for Black children to seek funding from private sources. Between 1866 and 1869, Anne Arundel County “colored schools” received funds and teachers from a variety of groups, including the Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of the Colored People. Van Bokkelen was a member.
At one point, the Mary Moss and J. Albert Adams academies were schools for county students unable to study in other schools because of behavioral issues.
Moss retired in 1970 after a career as an elementary school teacher, leader of the county teacher’s association and head of pupil personnel for the Board of Education. Adams was a Black entrepreneur in Annapolis who bought land along College Creek that became known as Adams Park.
When the two schools combined in 2016, they became Mary Moss @ J. Albert Adams Academy and are located on what was once Adams’ land.
Parents, who now are consulted before naming schools, haven’t always been happy with the choice.
Ruth Parker Eason started teaching in county schools in 1907 and retired 47 years later as the head of special education. When a school to house special education programs was built in the mid-1980s as part of the Old Mill High complex, her name seemed like a natural pick.
Some parents rebelled at the idea of labeling a school with the name that so clearly identified special education, and appealed to name it for the Old Mill complex, just like Old Mill middle schools north and south.
But the education behind the idea convinced the county to stick with the choice.
“Anne Arundel’s excellent special education program is the result of the hard work of Mrs. Eason and others like her,” retired teachers association president Ella Mae Phelps wrote in a letter to The Evening Capital in 1985.
The process for replacing Fox’s name will begin with a call for suggestions. There were 70 submitted for Crofton High School, the county’s newest school.
Suggestions will be made public and discussed at some kind of forum where other ideas can be made.
Then it’s up to the Board of Education, which must vote to approve the new name for that school in Pasadena formerly known as George Fox Elementary School.