Robert E. Lee Road is now history
Harris County commissioners unanimously approve a change that’s been years in the making
Cody Pogue was an early supporter of renaming Robert E. Lee Road, a street in the East Houston area where he grew up.
The 37-year-old local historian and teacher first heard about the proposed change about a year ago through a neighborhood Facebook group. Pogue supported the renaming and commented to that effect on the post. His views were met with anger.
But this mattered to him. He felt the streets his students traversed should reflect the names of people they could look up to, reflecting “things that fit more with the future that we desire to have,” rather than memorials to the Confederacy.
So, on Tuesday, when Harris County Commissioner’s Court unanimously voted on a plan to rename the street honoring a
Confederate general to Unison Road, Pogue called in support.
“I’d like to think that it is a unifying name,” Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis said Wednesday. He represents the area where the road is located.
Two weeks ago, he released a statement regarding the yearslong effort to rename the road. “It is past time to remove these vestiges of hate and bigotry from public spaces,” he said.
Ellis said during Tuesday’s meeting that his efforts were put on hold by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. When visiting the area after Harvey, Ellis said during an interview he believes he saw two Confederate flags.
“And then after this Floyd incident, I figured, you know what? We need to get this done,” Ellis said before the vote, referring to protests following George Floyd’s death by a Minnesota police officer.
“It is our history, but we can always change the way we recognize it,” Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia said.
The road sits in the Sheldon area, to the southwest of Sheldon Lake. Once a predominantly white area, the neighborhood is now home to a diverse population. Pogue, who is writing a history of the area, said the population is predominantly Latino, with whites only making up a small part of the demography.
The local push to rename roads honoring soldiers and leaders of the Confederacy began in earnest after the 2015 mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., and gained new momentum after the death of Floyd.
Lee, commander of the Confederate Army during the Civil War, frequently was honored following the war, with his face and name adorning statues, streets and counties across much of the South. Recently, a descendant condoned the removal of his ancestor’s statue in Richmond, Va., in the Washington Post.
In 2017, Houston changed the name of Dowling Street to Emancipation Avenue, replacing the name of the Confederate officer Richard “Dick” Dowling.
Last month, a statue of Dowling was removed from its post in Hermann Park, along with The Spirit of the Confederacy statue in Sam Houston Park. Dowling’s statue is being kept in storage until a relocation site is
found, and the The Spirit of the Confederacy Statue will be moved to the Houston Museum of African American Culture.
Houston ISD’s board of trustees voted in 2016 to rechristen eight schools named for Confederate soldiers and leaders.
Some area streets honoring Confederate soldiers remain unchanged. In Missouri City, for example, the names Bedford Forrest Drive, Stonewall Court and Confederate Court still mark the area.
Despite unanimous approval from commissioners, not everyone was satisfied with Ellis’ move to rename the road, including some who support the name’s removal.
Belinda Castro, chairwoman of the Harris County Tejano Democrats, supported the name change but preferred a Latino name. She called the name, Unison, “nowhere bilingual or anything,” and suggested the street be named “a Spanish name, a word, Spanish — anything like that.”
Longtime Robert E. Lee Road resident Robert Shannahan, 85, said the name change was unnecessary and referred to the road as a “little dead-end street.” Shannahan has lived on the road since the 1960s and was not concerned about the street name.
“I’ve been living here all these years, nobody brings that up,” Shannahan said of the controversial name.
His daughter, Judy Shannahan, 57, is more worried about the undue burden a name change puts on residents. Their neighbors are mostly elderly, she said, and she is concerned residents won’t get important mail, checks, bills and packages. She suggested mail is already slow in the area, and that even emergency services can have a hard time finding houses.
“I just don’t think with older people we should put that on them by changing the street name,” she said.
Ellis said he plans to take extra care with all of these issues. “This is not rocket science, it has happened before,” Ellis said. “We’ll make the process as seamless as possible.”
The commissioner initially considered various names, including naming the street after Dolores Huerta, American labor and civil rights activist. However, some politicians expressed her name might adorn a more significant thoroughfare.
Ellis and County Engineer John Blount said they aim to have the road officially renamed in the next 45 days.