RCSD to scrap school names honoring segregationist Louis Cerulli, slaveowner Charles Carroll
The Rochester City School District will rename elementary schools named after city co-founder Charles Carroll, a slaveowner, and former school board president Louis Cerulli, the most prominent local opponent of school integration during the Civil Rights era.
The school board is holding a hearing at 5 p.m. Tuesday to discuss names for seven schools in total, including five that are opening for the first time in 2024-25 as part of a district-wide reconfiguration.
Charles Carroll School 46, on Newcastle Road, and Louis Cerulli School 34, on Lexington Avenue, were late additions to the roster.
"We will rename schools #34 and #46 to continue our journey to remove the names of those who were slave owners and segregationists in our City, and replace them with leaders who are unifiers, trailblazers, and have made significant impacts transforming our community," the district wrote in a press release.
Charles Carroll, born in Maryland in 1767, belonged to one of the wealthiest families in America. Much of that family wealth derived from slavery; one research project determined they owned about 1,100 people in slavery.
Carroll joined with Nathaniel Rochester and William Fitzhugh in 1803 in purchasing the land that became the city of Rochester. An 1804 tax roll shows that he then owned 28 people in slavery at the largest of his several plantations.
He never lived in Rochester itself, but spent his last years on a 1,200 acre settlement in Livingston County. Before moving to New York in 1814, he took out a newspaper advertisement to sell "about FORTY VALUABLE NEGROES," according to a biographer.
▶ From 2020: Rochester's founding fathers owned people in slavery. Does it matter?
Carroll later served as a representative of the federal government during at least one improper treaty negotiation with the Senecas that resulted in a significant loss of land.
He signed his name to an 1823 treaty, attesting it had been "fairly and properly understood and transacted by all the parties of Indians concerned." But Seneca leaders later said they'd been bribed and threatened, and the full U.S. Senate declined to confirm the agreement.
Carroll is also the namesake of Charles Carroll Park, the downtown park along the Genesee River. City Council voted in 2022 to rename the park to coincide with the ROC the Riverway renovations.
Louis Cerulli, meanwhile, served on the Rochester school board from 1959 to 1969, including two stints as president. He was a prominent community leader who used his power to thwart the district's racial desegregation plans.
He became more emboldened after leaving office, forming an anti-integration organization called the United Schools Association. In 1971 he was photographed at a protest where anti-integrationists stood outside a liberal school board member's house after dark wearing white sheets.
Cerulli died in early 1972, and the school on Lexington Avenue was renamed in his honor in 1974.
In 2021 the Rochester school board voted to rename Nathaniel Rochester School 3. Rochester, like Carroll, was a prominent slaveowner.
After School 46 is renamed, RCSD will still have two schools named for men who owned people in slavery: James Monroe High School and John James Audubon School 33.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: RCSD to scrap school names honoring segregationist, slaveowner
