Outraged, disappointed

Regarding “Leaders demand Baytown lake be renamed,” (A1, Feb. 9): Words cannot express the outrage and disappointment I felt when I saw the story about the existence of a lake in Baytown, some 30 miles from Houston, called “Negrohead Lake.” Outraged, because it exists, and disappointed, because nothing has been done to remove that name and others like it in Texas, even though a law exists to remove these disgusting names.

This is personal for me, because as a Black kid growing up in the 1950s and ’60s in Dallas — I am a 40-plus-year resident of Houston now — I was confronted when I went to grocery stores in my Oak Cliff-area home with seeing a product on the shelves called “Negro Head Oysters.” The makers of that product had the gall to place on one side of the cans a picture of an oyster juxtaposed against one on the other side of a profile of an elderly Black man.

For many kids my age, such an image was, perhaps, unnoteworthy, but for me, the son of a civil rights activist who fought to eliminate “Negro Day” at the Texas State Fair and alongside Justice Thurgood Marshall to desegregate the Dallas public schools, seeing this was totally outrageous. I had thought that by now such vile racist images were gone, but I see they aren’t.

As a third-generation Texan and firstgeneration Houstonian, I applaud my friend and fellow LBJ School of Public Affairs graduate and roommate, Commissioner Rodney Ellis, for taking up the challenge to see this vile name and others like it throughout our beloved state removed and sent to history books or become the subject of internet searches where it belongs. It, along with other images like Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, Buckwheat (he was not a character created by Eddie Murphy for a “Saturday Night Live” skit) and Confederate statues don’t deserve to be publicly displayed.

Crawford B. Bunkley III, Cypress