Disability activists petition Minneapolis to rename Dight Street due to ties to eugenics advocate

The Minnesota Disability Justice Network is petitioning the city of Minneapolis to change the name of a local street name due to the historical figure’s ties to ableism, the Third Reich and the eugenics movement.

According to a news release, the organization has gotten more than 700 people to sign a petition to rename Dight Avenue in Minneapolis. The street is named after Charles Fremont Dight, a former professor at the University of Minnesota who was considered the leader of Minnesota’s eugenics movement.

"Dight not only founded the Minnesota Eugenics society but actively pursued the same type of eugenics as Nazi scientists such as Josef Mengele. In 1933, Dight wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler praising the Third Reich’s efforts to ‘stamp out mental inferiority,’" the Minnesota Disability Justice Network said in a statement.

He also successfully lobbied the Minnesota Legislature to pass a law in 1925 that legalized sterilization for "feeble-minded" and insane people under the guardianship of the Minnesota State Board of Control.

“Eugenics is the tool of prejudice and genocide. No person who popularized and practiced this insidious propaganda should have a street or even street sewer cover named after them," said Stacey Gurian-Sherman, a local community activist.

The network said they don’t have any specific name changes in mind but would like the street named after a disability advocate such as David Ketroser, an assistant district attorney and bioethicist, or Rick Cardenas, who fought to improve State Capitol access.