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Racism injures and kills every day. As if to legitimize it, streets and public spaces still bear the names of instigators of institutional and pseudo-scientific racism. Among them is Louis Agassiz, a notorious racist and glaciologist who is still well respected in Switzerland. There’s no room for a street named after him in a cosmopolitan city open to the world like La Chaux-de-Fonds. 

The American glaciologist of Fribourg origin, Louis Agassiz, was one of the pseudo-scientists who asserted that human races are by nature ordered by rank. As a recognized expert in glaciology and ichthyology he was sent to the United States for research where he contributed to racist theories. For example, he described the "Negro race" as "corrupt and degenerate" and exclaimed: "What a misfortune for the white race to have linked its existence so closely to the Negro race in many countries! God save us from such contacts!" (1). This was put forward in a context in which slavery was to generate some of the greatest crimes known to humanity.

Those in favor of continuing to honor Agassiz' memory assert that one should take into consideration the historical context of his studies. This is to deny the heavy opposition against racism of his days. Why isn’t the abolitionist movement that led to the Civil War (1861 - 1865) or why aren’t the theories of anthropologist Joseph-Anténor Firmin, published in the book The Equality of the Human Races: Positivist Anthropology (2) mentioned as context? To mention only Agassiz and similar thinkers as context of the time is to legitimize racism. To those who argue we better fight against today's injustices than rename yesterday's streets, we must reply: one does not exclude the other. Fighting contemporary inequalities and removing their symbolic foundations deeply anchored in history needs to be done in parallel; it is not a contradiction. 

Urban heritage and urban planning need to reflect the egalitarian society to which we aspire. Street signs commemorating slave-owners, colonizers or other forms of racism belong in museums. Explanatory signs need to replace them in public space and be put up in all spaces financed by fortunes of slavery. Also, these public spaces need to be renamed! 

This petition demands to rename Louis Agassiz street in La Chaux-de-Fonds. We suggest either to name it after an anti-racist personality like Jenny Humbert Droz or Rosa Parks, or to rename it to commemorate racism’s victims like Papa Renty who is best known for having suffered from Agassiz’ racism.

(1) Hans Faessler, Une Suisse esclavagiste – Un pays au dessus de tout soupçon, ed. Duboiris, 2007
(2) Joseph-Anténor Firmin, De l’Égalité des Races Humaines, 1885