photo by: Lisa Grossman

Kelly Barth, the president of the Lawrence Bird Alliance board, is pictured to the left during a birdwatching field trip at Burcham Park. Formerly known as the Jayhawk Audubon Society, the group voted to rename itself earlier this year.

A rebrand is often seen as an opportunity to change an identity for the better, and that much was true for the Jayhawk Audubon Society when its board voted earlier this summer to rename the group the Lawrence Bird Alliance.

But the reason behind that change was much bigger than a simple image refresh — it was to push back against an association with a namesake that has been revealed as a racist, an anti-abolitionist and a slave owner.

The Lawrence Bird Alliance has been around for more than five decades, after being founded in 1970. It’s one of more than 450 local chapters of the National Audubon Society in the U.S., which are dedicated to advancing grassroots conservation efforts.

Lawrence’s chapter, like the national organization, was previously named after John James Audubon, a 19th-century artist, naturalist and ornithologist known for his work to document and illustrate American birds. The National Audubon Society’s website says it’s fair to describe him as “a genius, a pioneer, a fabulist and a man whose actions reflected a dominant white view of the pursuit of scientific knowledge,” who made enormous contributions to ornithology, art and culture.

It also describes Audubon as a “complex and troubling character who did despicable things even by the standards of his day.” On top of atrocities like enslaving Black people, writing critically about emancipation and stealing Native American human remains to help a colleague scientifically assert that white people were superior to other races, he also likely committed academic fraud and plagiarism.

But even those revelations weren’t enough to unseat John James Audubon as the national organization’s namesake. Instead, local chapters like the Lawrence Bird Alliance are the ones bucking the national organization’s lead entirely, in the aftermath of a March 2023 vote when the National Audubon Society Board of Directors elected to retain the name after a yearlong evaluation process.

The national organization did, however, inform its local chapters that they were free to change their names while remaining part of the nationwide network. Lawrence’s group did just that within months.

“It really was not a difficult or fraught decision at all,” Kelly Barth, the president of the Lawrence Bird Alliance board, told the Journal-World earlier this month. “… There wasn’t a single board member who felt that we should not do this, that we should not move forward and change the name. That proved to me that we were definitely doing the right thing.”

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Earlier this year, the National Audubon Society posted an FAQ page explaining its decision to keep the Audubon name, which again acknowledges Audubon’s “complex legacy.” Despite that, the national group cited a desire to instead focus on the critical threats facing birds and other wildlife due to climate change. Susan Bell, the chair of the National Audubon Society’s Board of Directors, also said at the time that the name has “come to represent so much more than the work of one person, but a broader love of birds and nature.”

Barth, like the other people involved with National Audubon Society chapters, sees the national organization’s goals as important not just to bird species but to the environment as a whole. She said local chapters, through their work, can help to “remind people what a beautiful planet we live on” and generate an appreciation and love of nature.

But at the same time, Barth said members of the Lawrence Bird Alliance felt disappointed that pleas to the national organization from Black ornithologists like Corina Newsome seemed to have fallen on deaf ears earlier this year. Newsome in 2020 co-organized Black Birders Week in the wake of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery and the racism faced by Black birdwatcher Christian Cooper in New York City, and she has collaborated directly with the National Audubon Society.

“There was a lot of disappointment,” Barth said. “A lot of this was led by people of color, some BIPOC people, people of Indigenous (descent) — often employees of the organization. … (Newsome) and several other people started this movement and wanted to urge Audubon to get the name change going.”

But that didn’t happen. Barth said there’s a “sting” to having Audubon’s name associated with an organization that sets out to be inclusive to all. That’s especially pronounced when it comes to Lawrence, Barth said — it was “unacceptable” for the group to justify keeping the Audubon name in a city that was founded by abolitionists and is today home to Haskell Indian Nations University.

The National Audubon Society did announce a new step in its equity work earlier this year: At the same time that the board of directors announced the name would stay the same, it also announced a $25 million commitment to “fund the expansion of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging specific work in both internal and conservation initiatives over the next five years.”

Nevertheless, leaders with the Lawrence Bird Alliance like Barth and board vice president Lynn Byczynski felt that the group needed to at least make an attempt at changing its name, both due to their personal feelings and to make sure everyone in the community felt welcome to participate in the group’s events.

“Lynn even said — and I agreed with her — that if we hadn’t changed the name, both of us would’ve felt the need to leave the organization,” Barth said.

Others throughout the country have wrestled with these same conversations. The society’s chapters in Detroit, Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin, all have changed to “Bird Alliance” organizations, and Seattle’s chapter now goes by “Birds Connect Seattle.” Chapters in New York City and Portland have both also announced their intent to drop Audubon from their names, but are still in the process of deciding on alternatives. San Francisco, San Diego, Atlanta and Washington, D.C., are still more chapters that decided to drop Audubon from their names.

It becomes a less controversial decision with each chapter that moves forward with a name change, Barth said, and there’s definitely momentum for others to get on board, too.

“Our hope is that other chapters will get on the bandwagon, but we can’t guarantee that and for various reasons, we have to respect that people don’t want to change it,” Barth said. “We just knew that for us, this was really important.”

There’s still some transitioning left to do for the Lawrence Bird Alliance, though. The group’s materials still include the former name, and its web address is still jayhawkaudubon.org. In part, Barth said that’s because the group didn’t want to lose people who recognize the Audubon name.

From here, Barth said the Lawrence Bird Alliance will move forward with its gradual rebrand and will continue to strive to be an inclusive organization for all.

“That was our intent, was to just make sure that our organization’s name reflects its membership’s feelings and associations with not only birds but the other people who love them,” Barth said.