J.J. Finley elementary is officially renamed Carolyn Beatrice Parker Elementary

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (WCJB) -J.J. Finley Elementary School has officially been renamed to Carolyn Beatrice Parker Elementary.

The Alachua County School Board voted unanimously for the change on Tuesday night.

The school is named after Carolyn Beatrice Parker, who worked as a physicist on the Manhattan Project.

The committee endorsed Parker citing the adversity she faced during the Jim Crow era and her efforts against Nazism during World War II.

Parker taught at Lincoln High School after graduating magnum cum laude from Fisk University with a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1938.

Parker, who was born in Gainesville in 1917, came from a family of academics. Her father Dr. Julius A. Parker was a physician who graduated from Meharry Medical College, the first medical school for African Americans in the South. Her cousin, Joan Murrell Owens, was a marine biologist.

During World War II, Park worked as a research physicist on the Dayton Project, a division of the Manhattan Project.

Parker and several of her siblings attended Lincoln High School. Her sister, Julia Leslie Cosby, became the first Black woman to teach in Alachua County’s school district.

The name change followed a series of meetings to find a new name for the elementary school. In June, the Gator chapter of the NAACP, urged the school board to retire the name Jesse Johnson Finley who was a confederate general during the Civil War.

The committee members said they hope to reflect a more complete history of the community, share compelling stories of hidden figures and spark meaningful dialogue about race and equality.

Parker’s name was picked from a list of more than 50 names which included public figures such as Tom Petty, Dr. Watson Porter, Zora Neale Hurston, Matthew M. Lewey and Josiah T. Wells.

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