Texas Legislature passes bill to remove 'Negro' from names of places

The racist names of geographic features that dot the Texas landscape may finally be about to change thanks to a measure that has cleared both the Texas House and Senate. Lawmakers agreed to a resolution that will push the federal government to rename at least 28 sites around Texas that use the word “negro” in their descriptions, like Negrohead Lake in Baytown, Negrohead Hill in Burnet County and Negro Creek in Stephens County. “No Texan, regardless of race, should have to drive by Negrohead Lake or see a sign for Negrohead Creek,” said state Sen. Borris Miles, D-Houston.

Gary Bledsoe, the president of the Texas NAACP, said that in the 1960s, then-President John F. Kennedy ordered the N-word be changed to “negro” for all geographic sites. But he and others said that didn’t go anywhere close enough to fixing the problem. “We must make a statement that official names based on race as these are are completely inappropriate,” Bledsoe said. Under Senate Concurrent Resolution 29, the state is formally asking the United States Board on Geographic Names to change the names. The USBGN, an arm of the Department of the Interior, cannot change the names without a formal request from a state. The Senate passed SCR 29 in April by a 31-0 vote. The House followed suit late Monday night with a 146-0 vote. It’s no the first time officials have tried to rename Negrohead Lake in Baytown. In 1999, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names rejected Texas’ proposal to rename Negrohead Lake as Lake Henry Doyle, after the first Black law student at a state-owned school in Texas, because it “did not observe any evidence that there was any local involvement in the renaming process.”