Lexington Tradition Middle School is getting a new name. Here’s just one vote. | Opinion
It’s great to see LTMS Principal Bryne Jacobs engaging with the entire school community to decide on a new name to embrace the school’s new mission of becoming a hub of arts education in downtown Lexington.
They have a lot of great ideas that will indeed better encapsulate the school and its students. Any one of the suggestions so far would be great: East End Middle School, or Helen Caise Wade Middle School for the first woman to desegregate Fayette schools, or Zirl Palmer, a Lexington pharmacist, community advocate, and the first Black appointed to the University of Kentucky Board of Trustees.
But as a former LTMS parent, I just want to throw my tiny vote for one of the other names on the list: Lewis and Harriet Hayden.
Lewis and Harriet Hayden were an enslaved couple in Lexington. In 1844, with the help of two white abolitionists, they escaped up North Limestone to Maysville, then across the Ohio River. Using the Underground Railroad, they eventually made it to Canada.
As my former colleague Tom Eblen documented in a two-part series, here and here, Harriet and Lewis established a boarding house and clothing store that became important stops on the Underground Railroad. The self-taught Lewis Hayden wrote and spoke throughout the North about his experiences, and after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the couple became known for helping fugitive slaves captured up north.
In 1873, Hayden was elected as a representative to the Massachusetts State legislature.
Incidentally, the two people in Lexington who helped him, Delia Webster and Calvin Fairbank, were sent to prison for the crime of helping the Haydens. Webster was released, but Fairbank served until 1849 when Hayden paid his former owner $650 as compensation for his loss. The former enslaver then petitioned the Kentucky governor to free Fairbank.
Harriet and Lewis Hayden are so fascinating that they are the subject of an upcoming monument to the Underground Railroad.
Where will be placed? On the corner of North Limestone and Fourth Street, otherwise known as the corner of Lexington Traditional Magnet School.
“It’s a no-brainer,” said Yvonne Giles, Lexington’s Black history guru who serves on the Lexington Freedom Train committee that is fundraising for the monument, who also thinks the Haydens should be honored with the school name.
“This couple are an example of how African Americans, particularly the enslaved made choices and decisions that affected not only their lives but many others.”
In January, the Lexington Freedom Train committee will be doing a series of education programs on the project, including more about the Haydens, and what the monument will look like. Sculptor Basil Watson was chosen earlier this year.
One of the East End’s most recent elementary schools was named for William Wells Brown, a formerly enslaved man from Kentucky, who also escaped to Boston to become an abolitionist, novelist, playwright, and historian.
Naming its feeder middle school for the Haydens would be a fitting continuation to honor and remember Kentucky heroes who symbolize the importance of education, courage and the fight for justice.
