[ad_1]
But Mr. Ellis hadn’t realized that the effort had been blocked, he recalled recently, and had thought for years the names had been changed until a National Public Radio reporter asked about it last year.
“I said, ‘That’s done, that’s over with,’” Mr. Ellis recalled telling the reporter. “He said, ‘No, sir, it’s not.’”
There remain several hundred geographic sites in the United States whose names include “Negro,” according to a government database. Hundreds of those — and others that have been changed in past decades — used a similar, more offensive racial slur until 1963, when the government ordered that word’s removal from remaining sites.
Last year, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, then a Democratic congresswoman from New Mexico, introduced the Reconciliation in Place Names Act, which would create a process for the Board on Geographic Names to review and revise offensive names of federal lands and sites.
Representative Al Green of Texas, a co-sponsor of the legislation, said in a statement on Friday night, “I am proud to know that the U.S. Board on Geographic Names has taken a step in the right direction by formally approving name changes that will remove racist place names of 16 geographical sites in Texas.” Mr. Green, a Democrat, added, “As a son of the segregated South, I am opposed to anyone experiencing or reliving the horrors of racism when visiting geographic landmarks.”
Mr. Ellis said that while the renaming of the 16 Texas sites is a step forward, there remains more work to be done, including changing other names that are racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-immigrant.
“I hope it leads to changing the policies at that board,” Mr. Ellis said. “There are a lot of things we all have to go to Congress for. This ought to not be one.”
[ad_2]
Source link
