SAN JOSE, Calif. — For decades, the Bascom family name has adorned one of San Jose’s busiest thoroughfares, a bustling light rail station and prominent buildings around the city.
But now the California pioneers whose lineage in the area dates back to the Gold Rush era are the latest historical figures to come under scrutiny over their ties to the slave trade.
Spurred by county health workers who questioned the family’s past, Santa Clara County has decided to remove the name from Valley Health Center Bascom — an outpatient clinic established in 1985 — replacing it with “San Jose.”
“I think it’s about time,” said Herbert G. Ruffin, a historian who has investigated the Bascoms’ history, about the county building name change. “This is just the beginning.”
According to records, Dr. Louis Hazelton Bascom, who came to the city with his wife and seven children in 1849 from Kentucky, bought an unidentified Black man upon his arrival to be his cook for four years — a troubling account that prompted the health workers to seek to have the name removed.
The move places the Bascoms on a long list of historical figures around the Bay Area and beyond whose names have stirred debate amid a reckoning of the country’s racist past.
It also may put a wide variety of sites around San Jose that bear the Bascom name on the chopping block, most significantly a 158-year-old, 5-mile-long avenue that runs through both San Jose and a small chunk of Campbell. The Bascom name also appears on a San Jose community center, light rail station and public library, which came under fire a year ago when a petition was created to change the name for the same reasons, though the effort has so far gone nowhere.
Santa Clara Valley Medical Center CEO Paul Lorenz said county health workers approached him in April about removing the family’s name.
“When the history of the Bascom family, including slave ownership, became known, we listened to the thoughtful and constructive opinions of our physicians and staff,” said Lorenz in a statement. “By doing so, and by changing the clinic’s name, we uphold our beliefs and commitment to our community, employees, and patients.”
On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to rename the hospital. The vote was part of a wider rebranding effort that included a handful of other health centers at a cost of around $250,000.
At the center of the Bascom controversy is a May 1887 article penned by historian M.H. Field in The Overland Monthly, a now-defunct national magazine once based in California.
“It was not till spring that Doctor (Bascom) found a black man who could cook,” wrote Field in a larger story about the family’s arrival in San Jose. “He paid $800 for him.”
Still a mystery are the exact circumstances surrounding the cook’s arrangement, as well as what eventually happened to the man after a four-year period with the Bascoms, as additional documentation hasn’t come to light.
Ruffin, whose 2014 book “Uninvited Neighbors: African Americans in Silicon Valley” mentions the Bascoms, said that the history of slavery in California around the time of the Gold Rush was complicated and murky. Though California was established in 1850 with statewide legislation banning the practice, localities such as the then-capital San Jose did not enforce the law for roughly five years. This meant that a free person could be sitting in the same room as someone who was enslaved.
Field makes mention of this in the 1887 article. “Folks said (the cook) wouldn’t stay — for, of course, he was free in California — but he did,” he wrote.
Ruffin says that the evidence that the Bascoms purchased the man — combined with similar stories he’s investigated around that time in California — indicates the cook was a slave.
“A free person does not get purchased for $800,” said Ruffin, an associate professor of African American studies at Syracuse University.
Louis Bascom and his wife, Anne Marie, are both buried at the Oak Hill Funeral Home in south San Jose. Described as “early California pioneers” on their gravestone, their home was known as a “center of activity” within the community. Louis practiced medicine but liked to farm, the gravestone states, and he and his wife eventually moved to Santa Clara near where Bascom Avenue is located.
Local historian Frank Maggi said that a number of early Californians also were slaveowners, including the state’s first governor Peter Burnett, whose name was taken off of a San Jose middle school in 2019 and replaced with the title of a local Native American tribe because of the politician’s racist past. James Reed, who has a street named after him in San Jose and was one of the organizers of the ill-fated Donner Party, also was a slave owner.
But some San Jose residents question the removal of the Bascom name.
Sitting in her silver SUV outside of the renamed county health building, Corina Aguilar said she felt that putting Bascom on the hospital doesn’t explicitly equate to appreciation — and that a teachable moment could be lost.
“In that case,” she said looking at her daughter in the backseat, “you may as well not teach about slavery in school then. Certain things are just named after certain people. Everybody has something in their past.”
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