Missouri City ditches street named after a KKK leader
Residents and elected leaders gathered in Missouri City over the weekend to celebrate the renaming of a street that for decades held the name of a Confederate general and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Liberty Way has replaced Bedford Forrest Drive in the Vicksburg subdivision. Cheers erupted as the new street sign was unveiled Saturday.
“The individuals — taxpaying citizens and residents of Missouri City — who lived on this street chose to rally themselves together by signing a petition and saying they wanted to bring about change so that they could have a name that would unify them as a community,” said Missouri City Councilman Jeffrey Boney, whose district includes the Vicksburg subdivision.
The change was approved by the Missouri City Council in July.
Rodney and Angie Pearson, who have lived on Bedford Forrest Drive since 2006, led the effort for the petition drive to rename the street. The subdivision, located off Highway 6, was developed more than 30 years ago. It is not immediately known how the street came to be named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Tennessee native.
Forrest joined the Ku Klux Klan in 1867 and was elected its first Grand Wizard. The group used violence and threats to maintain white control over formerly enslaved people, according to historical accounts. The Klan suppressed voting rights of Blacks in the South through violence and intimidation during the elections of 1868. A year later, Forrest expressed disillusionment with what he saw as the lack of discipline in the white supremacist terrorist group across the South, according to historical accounts. Two years ago, Tennessee elected leaders voted to move a statue of Forrest from the State Capitol to the Tennessee State Museum.
“If you embrace certain values — fairness, goodness, kindness, doing honorable things — then you’ll agree that ‘Liberty Way’ is a great name to follow the name that was here before,” Rodney Pearson said. “It’s a modern and appropriate name for our kids to be riding their bikes under, a move in the right direction.”
“For me, living on this street under its former name was disrespecting our ancestors,” said Angie Pearson. “We were living on a street honoring somebody who killed a lot of them.”
In April 1864, Forrest’s troops at the Battle of Fort Pillow massacred hundreds of surrendered troops, mostly Black soldiers and white Tennessean Southern Union soldiers fighting for the United States, according to historical accounts. Forrest endured much of the blame for the slaughter at the the time, but historians continue to hotly debate his responsibility for the attack.
This is not the first time the community changed a street name with Confederate ties.
Beau and Rhonda Gilbo led an effort to change their street name from “Confederate Drive” to “Prosperity Drive.”
Renaming a street is not a simple task in the city. Boney, the council member, was instrumental in changing Missouri City’s street-renaming code. Previously, 90 percent of property owners needed to sign a petition to have their street renamed. In September 2020, the threshold was lowered to 70 percent. Boney said that achieving consensus among nine out of ten individuals presented a challenge.
“I am proud to support the renaming of these streets in Missouri City and look forward to supporting future renamings,” said U.S. Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, who donated $1,975 of his own money for the street renaming. “This is an important step in removing the symbols of hate and oppression from our community.”