Hit the road Nathaniel Rochester. RIT renames hall for Frederick Douglass' granddaughter
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Rochester Institute of Technology will strip Nathaniel Rochester's name from a residence hall and instead rename it for Fredericka Douglass Sprague Perry, granddaughter of Frederick Douglass and an advocate for Black women and children, it announced Tuesday.
The name change is both an honor for Perry, who studied at Mechanic's Institute, the forerunner of RIT, and also a distancing from the city's namesake. Nathaniel Rochester amassed his wealth through slavery and brought enslaved people with him to New York.
"As we address this reality, university leaders — including students — want to convey one small but meaningful way for those of us living today to be accountable and be empathetic toward our African American students and employees," RIT President David Munson said in a statement.
The school will change the signage on the building immediately and will hold a formal renaming ceremony Aug. 31.
The eight-story Fredericka Douglass Sprague Perry Hall becomes the first building on RIT's campus named for a person of color.
"It's really important to have these physical edifices that represent our history," dann j. Broyld, a Rochester native and professor of African American history at University of Massachusetts Lowell, said. "To give deference to her instead of to him is good news."
Who was Fredericka Douglass Sprague Perry?
Fredericka Perry was born in Rochester in 1880, one of seven children of Frederick Douglass's daughter Rosetta. She studied at the Mechanic's Institute and spent most of her life in Missouri.
She founded the Big Sister Home for Colored Girls in Kansas City and also was active in the Missouri State Association of Colored Women's Clubs and the Frederick Douglass Memorial Association, among other things.
"Mrs. Perry, born in Rochester, left here as a child but she never lost her affection or interest for the city where her famous grandfather lived," the Democrat and Chronicle wrote upon her death in 1943. "Mrs. Perry did much in Kansas City to defend and promote the interests of Negroes. Her civic leadership in the Negro community there did much to carry on the cause in which Frederick Douglass spent her life."
Among other things, she sought to keep alive the memory of her grandfather and of Black history more generally.
"When the Negro in the South can go unmolested to the polls and cast his chosen vote ... and when the 14th and 15th Amendments are strictly observed, then I will say let us cease to recall what has been," she said in Rochester in 1939 at a remembrance ceremony for her grandfather.
Who was Nathaniel Rochester?
Nathaniel Rochester purchased land for the city that bears his name in 1803 along with two other Maryland slaveholders, Charles Carroll and William Fitzhugh. Contrary to stories later told by their descendants, all three men brought people in slavery to New York.
Just months before slavery was finally abolished in New York in July 1827, Nathaniel Rochester was still renting out the services of a Black person he owned in slavery in Rochester.
Two years later, Rochester was one of the founders of the Rochester Athenaeum, an education institute that later merged into the Mechanic's Institute and thus is the earliest entry in RIT's institutional genealogy.
Where else has a landmark name changed in Rochester?
The Rochester City School District stripped his name from School 3 in 2021, renaming it the Dr. Alice Holloway Young School of Excellence, after the first Black principal in the district.
Also in 2021, Rochester City Council announced it would study renaming Charles Carroll Park and Nathaniel Square (there is also an RCSD school named for Charles Carroll, who in addition to owning dozens of people in slavery also served as a federal agent for a Seneca land treaty that was later disputed as fraudulent).
The city has not provided an update on the renaming process. A statue of Nathaniel Rochester in Nathaniel Square, at South Avenue and Alexander Street, was defaced in 2020.
Contact staff writer Justin Murphy at jmurphy7@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: RIT renames Nathaniel Rochester Hall for Douglass' granddaughter
