Texas’ racist place names set for historical reckoning

Racist and offensive Texas place names are holdovers from a dark past, but they are poised to finally change as a reckoning on how white America treats black people washes over the United States.

Though state lawmakers sought to officially rename a series of features in 1991, that change was stymied, and decades later places like “Negrohead Lake” or “Negro Creek” still carry their derogatory monikers.

Yet the murder last year of African-American George Floyd under a white police officer’s knee has brought new impetus to confronting racism, including place names or statues honouring Confederate war generals.

While Texas fought on the side of the slavery-supporting Confederacy during the nation’s civil war, today it is a state where nonHispanic white people are in the minority.

A vote by a federal panel that is set for next month could finally officially rebaptise 16 Texas places whose names include the word “negro”, a once common description that many now see as outdated and offensive.

“It’s a tremendous relief. It’s late, but better late than never,” Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis said.

In 1991, as a state senator, Ellis carried a bill to have those names removed. But he did not follow up, saying: “I thought passing a law was enough.”

However the power to officially change the titles of features like lakes and rivers belongs to a federal panel called the US Board on Geographic Names that is due to revisit the matter on June 10.

The panel had voted against the changes in 1998, after waiting years to consider the question. Their explanation?

They cited “a concern that there had been no consultation with local governments, nor did the [1991] legislation provide any biographical details” on the people whose names would be given to the features, board geographer Jennifer Runyon said.

Under the rules, applicants are supposed to show a link between a place and any person for whom it would be named. But, Runyon said, no follow up on those questions was ever submitted to the bureau after its rejection.

That changed in late 2020 when the panel got a media query about the names, which led the Harris County commissioner to push for the changes.

Runyon said the panel agreed, in part, because the state had not been using the old names for close to 30 years now, “along with the renewed interest in the matter”.