UIC John Marshall School Of Law Dropping Its Name Over Namesakes's Slave Trading Past
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Thursday night the University of Illinois at Chicago Board of Trustees voted to removed the well known name John Marshall from the University of Illinois at Chicago because it has come to light that Marshall owned slaves and supported slavery in the United states.
In the lobby of the UIC John Marshall Law School is a portrait of John Marshall, the fourth chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, but the portrait and the name of the school for more than a century in Chicago will go away.
The law school was private until it merged with UIC in 2019, and soon after, Marshall's views were called into question.
In a letter to alumni, the school said many students and alumni "were unaware of Chief Justice John Marshall's ownership and trading of enslaved peoples and his legal decisions against them." The letter goes on to say Marshall's "contributions to American jurisprudence are well documented. His darker history was unknown by JMLS's founders and until more recenty, many historians."
On Thursday the University of Illinois Board of Trustees voted to remove the name synonymous to law. Moving forward the school will simply be known as the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law.
