Thomas Jefferson's Name Does Not Belong In Harlem, Local Pol Says

HARLEM, NY — Assembly Member Eddie Gibbs spent his childhood swimming, barbecuing and playing in Harlem's Thomas Jefferson Park, and that's why he wants the kids of Harlem to give it a new name.

“We want that park to be named after someone we can actually look up to, someone that can inspire us to be better," Gibbs told Patch. “We know Thomas Jefferson was a great founder and president, but he wasn’t great to the African American community."

Gibbs is spearheading an initiative to rename two Harlem community centers that bare Jefferson's name— the park on First Avenue and East 111th Street and the NYCHA housing development blocks away on Third Avenue and East 115th Street — and putting the decision in the hands of the community, the Assembly member told Patch this week.

To that end, Gibbs is hosting an essay contest for Harlem students to submit new names for the beloved park, and has already received proposals to honor the indigenous people who first lived in New York, a human rights organization that fought to empower colonized people, and Frederick Douglass.

"We should rename Jefferson Park to FD Park," wrote a student at middle school P.S. 206.

"FD stands for Frederick Douglass because he was born a slave and was able to get out of slavery. Compared to Thomas Jefferson, who had slaves, he sold them, and he abused them."

Gibbs said he was also inspired by local community members who witnessed the removal of the Thomas Jefferson statue from City Hall in 2021 — multiple schools in New Jersey and Virginia have also removed the name — and wanted to know why it shouldn't happen in Harlem.

"When are we going to do it here in our community?'" locals asked Gibbs. "I started thinking, 'They're right.'"

Gibbs pointed specifically to the third U.S. president's ownership of enslaved people — more than 600 enslaved during his lifetime, according to the Smithsonian Museum — and Jefferson's treatment of women, detailed in Nancy Isenberg's history "White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History Of Class In America."

"Jefferson had little difficulty in breeding slaves as chattel," Isenberg wrote.

The Assembly member began circulating petitions — which received widespread support from the Harlem community — and is now querying NYCHA tenants and East Harlem school children.

The East Harlem student essay contest for the Thomas Jefferson Park renaming will last until Feb. 3, at which point Gibbs will decide what his timeline for the official renaming process will be.

Gibbs will only put forward names suggested by locals when the official legislative process to rename the spaces begin, he pledged.

“I want the people to decide," Gibbs told Patch. "When our kids play in the park, and they say, 'Hey, we're in Thomas Jefferson Park,' there's no inspiration there to be better or do better."

Judging from the submissions of local students, the Assembly member and the community will have a slew of interesting options, including The Young Lords and Lenape Park.

"Many people don’t know how much about all the bad things he did and we only learn Jefferson’s myth," wrote the student who nominated Lenape Park. “It teaches that we don’t learn from the reality of Jefferson."

In the case of the Jefferson Houses, Gibb's office has created a channel for the tenants to submit renaming ideas.

Gibbs is prepared for pushback but said he feels strongly that the East Harlem spaces should honor someone else.

"There shouldn’t be any controversy because the community decided who their park and housing developments should be named after," Gibbs said.

"That person who would have a knee-jerk reaction won't be African American, and won't be anyone that's been through that degradation or someone that has been through that horrifying lifestyle of being enslaved, tortured and raped."

Gibbs message to that hypothetical person was this: "You haven't gone through the degradation this man put us through, the horror."