A product of the Cleveland schools will now inspire students in a school that bears her name.
CMSD on Tuesday celebrated renaming the former Patrick Henry PreK-8 school for the late Stephanie Tubbs Jones, the first Black woman from Ohio elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, the first Black prosecutor in Ohio and a Cuyahoga County and Cleveland municipal judge.
“This is a full circle moment,” Mervyn Jones, her son, told an audience that filled the school gym.
Stephanie Tubbs Jones School is among the first three schools to be renamed under a review process that the Board of Education initiated last year.
Board policy prohibits naming schools for individuals who have a documented history of enslaving other humans, or actively participating in the institution of slavery, systemic racism, the oppression of people of color, women, or other minority groups, or who have been a member of a supremacist organization. Patrick Henry is known for being a Founding Father, but he also was a slave owner.
For years, Councilman Kevin Conwell called for renaming the school in honor of Tubbs Jones, who was a Collinwood High School graduate. He said he woke up Tuesday with tears in his eyes because students of color would be able to look up to the late congresswoman.
The school is already getting students to focus on the Tubbs Jones legacy. Principal Natalie Smith-Benson said students wrote essays about her, and Conwell purchased bicycles that will be presented to those whose entries were judged to be best.
“We want to instill some of the qualities she exemplified,” Smith-Benson said. “We want to transfer those qualities to our scholars.”
The event featured a host of public officials. Many women in the audience wore bright red, a symbol of the membership they shared with Tubbs Jones in the Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
Mayor Justin Bibb, one of the speakers, addressed students who were present, saying: “You stand on the shoulders of giants. As mayor, I’m counting on you, and the City of Cleveland is counting on you to live up to the legacy of Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones.”
The next ribbon-cutting is scheduled for 1 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 7 at Natividad Pagan International Newcomers Academy, formerly named for President Thomas Jefferson. Pagan, who died in 2016, was a community leader and CMSD administrator who served as principal of the Newcomers Academy, a school for refugees and immigrants.
At 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 13, the District will celebrate the naming of a school for Mary Church Terrell, an internationally known lecturer, educator and activist for racial equality and women’s rights. The school, located at 3595 Bosworth Road, formerly was named for biologist and geologist Louis Agassiz.