The request comes after the board voted unanimously to rename James Madison Memorial High School to Vel Phillips Memorial High School, in honor of the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law School School, win a seat on the Milwaukee City Council, become a judge in Wisconsin and get elected to statewide office. She died in 2018 at the age of 95.
A committee of community members charged with the task of renaming the high school brought their suggestion before the board’s Operations Work Group in November after a five-month deliberation process. The committee whittled a list of 26 names to four, and finally settled on Phillips in a 10-1 vote in October.
The high school’s name change is the latest of several decisions spurred by Black students pushing for a racial reckoning in Madison. Former Memorial student Mya Berry called on the board to rename the school in August 2020 because James Madison, the fourth U.S. president and the city’s namesake, was a slave owner.
In December 2020 a Madison School Board ad hoc committee, formed to rename Falk Elementary School, voted unanimously to recommend the building be named after Milele Chikasa Anana, a prominent civil rights activist and the first African American to be voted to a public school board in Wisconsin.