Community and civil-rights activists are criticizing Auburn, Calif.‘s decision to name a park after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose estate provided the land but who became a lightning rod for controversy during his life for his views on race and intelligence, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Auburn officials said they were not aware of the late William B. Shockley’s views when they accepted his estate’s donation of the 28-acre property on the condition that it be named for Mr. Shockley and his wife, Emmy, who died in 2007. However, officials said they do not plan to return the gift.

Mr. Shockley, who died in 1989, is credited as co-inventor of the transistor, for which he and two colleagues received the Nobel Prize in 1956. In subsequent years, he gained greater notoriety as a proponent of eugenics, a largely discredited movement that held that intelligence was a genetic function of race.