A park renaming for a Bowling Green pioneer is a fitting tribute.

The Bowling Green City Commission last week approved renaming West End Park to honor the Rev. H.D. Carpenter.

Carpenter helped shape the lives of countless Warren County children in the 1900s.

At a time when Black students were given almost no public education resources, Carpenter teamed up with the national Rosenwald Fund to open a school in Delafield in 1923.

Funded by Julius Rosenwald, part owner of Chicago’s Sears, Roebuck and Co., Rosenwald schools and related facilities were built throughout the segregated South in the early 1900s to provide education to Black children.

The schools were required to have local support as well, and that’s where Carpenter came into the picture.

He was the pastor of historic New Bethel Baptist Church and leader of the city’s NAACP chapter. With his support, the Delafield Rosenwald School served local students up until the desegregation of local schools in 1963.

Carpenter was not only the driving force behind the school, he also taught there.

The Rev. Ron Whitlock Sr. drove the effort to rename the park for Carpenter, and remembered him as a respected community leader and a liaison between the city’s white and Black communities.

“It got to the point that (Carpenter) was so powerful that the police department depended on him to make sure things were run right,” Whitlock said. “In fact, the people would call him first before they called the police department. That’s how important he was to that community … such a strong person.”

Honoring Carpenter’s legacy was rightly fully supported by city officials.

“Renaming the West End Park to the H. D. Carpenter park is a big tribute to this remarkable man and his contributions to our city,” Commissioner Carlos Bailey said last week.

We agree.