Push on to rename Austin road
Virginia attack renews calls to change name of Robert E. Lee Road.
City Council Member Ann Kitchen on Tuesday said she will spearhead an effort to rename Robert E. Lee Road in South Austin as a chorus of residents call for the Confederate general’s name to be stricken from Austin streets in light of the Charlottesville, Va., attack.
Calls for the street to be renamed have grown since Saturday, when a suspected white supremacist rammed his car into a group of protesters in Charlottesville, many of them calling for the removal of a statue there of Lee. One woman was killed.
“Seeing the hatred and the violence, it should shake us all to our core,” Kitchen said during an Austin City Council work session Tuesday. “I think it’s incumbent on all of us in responsibility for the entire country to stand up and say, ‘This is not who we are, and this is not who we are in Austin, this is not who we are in Texas, this is not who we are in the nation.’ ”
Kitchen said she would bring forward an application to change the name by Aug. 24 and ask the community to suggest alternatives. The road, which stretches south for about half a mile from Barton Springs Road at the Barton Creek Bridge, is in her council district.
In Austin, an online petition calling for Lee’s name to be stricken from Austin’s streets has garnered more than 13,400 signatures since Saturday.
A similar push led the Austin school board to rename Robert E. Lee Elementary School in May 2016 after a white supremacist killed nine African-Americans