Hidden Figures: Andrew Jackson School Replaces Name With NASA's First Black Engineer

The 7th U.S. President and face on the $20 bill, Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), has been replaced as the namesake of a Salt Lake City, Utah, school as district officials and students expressed concern over his role in the expansion of slavery and anti-Native American campaigns.

Jackson, who served as president from 1829 to 1837, was voted out of the school's title unanimously by the Salt Lake City School Board of Education Tuesday and is set to be officially replaced by Mary W. Jackson -- NASA's first African-American engineer, the Salt Lake City Tribune reports. Mary Jackson became NASA’s first-ever black female engineer in 1958. The book-turned-2016 film, “Hidden Figures," details the mathemetician and aerospace engineer's struggles alongside supervisor Dorothy Vaughan and Katherine Goble in segregated, early 1960s America.

Margot Lee Shetterly is the author of the 2016 book of the same name and Janelle Monáe portrayed Mary Jackson, a Virginia native who died in 2005.

Principal Jana Edward of Andrew Jackson Elementary, which will be renamed to Mary W. Jackson with a celebration this spring, applauded the decision. “It was a very unifying experience. It was very democratic. I think it symbolized what our country can do when we come together to recognize what really happened in history,” she told the Salt Lake Tribune. Parents and school staff discussed the name change for years, with 73 percent of community residents supporting the replacement of Andrew Jackson's name.

Several district officials held back tears as the motion for renaming passed unanimously Tuesday evening, with a standing ovation from parents and diversity advocates who attended the meeting. “We just thought it would be good to have a school that honored somebody I could tell my children to look up to,” said school community council chair Neal Patwari.

Fifth-grader Andrei Olivo was among several students who spoke out about their agreement with the name change.

“Say a Jewish kid went to a school called Adolf [Hitler],” Olivo told the Salt Lake Tribune. “Your culture feels disrespected...It's incredible how [Mary Jackson] worked under all the stresses people her dealt with. She's a person of color, a woman. It was very hard for women of that time."

Former President Jackson's role in the Trail of Tears and the genocide of Native Americans has led to recent criticism by top government and education leaders who have been weary of promoting Jackson's presidency marked by slavery expansion ahead of the Civil War as well as his relentless campaign against Native Americans.

But Obama Administration-era efforts under then-Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to replace his face with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill have been declined by current Trump-appointed U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Mnuchin told Politico last year, "People have been on the bills for a long period of time. This is something we’ll consider; right now we have a lot more important issues to focus on."

President Trump has previously remarked that replacing Jackson with Tubman on the $20 bill is "pure political correctness." In a 2017 interview, Trump told the Washington Examiner he thinks Jackson could have avoided the U.S. Civil War. Trump hung a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office after his inauguration.

"I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War," Trump said. "There’s no reason for this. People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War—if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there a Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?"