Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Racist Place Names
Slate has an interesting article on racist places names, a follow up to the controversy about the name of Texas Gov. Rick Perry's family hunting camp (a name I don't feel comfortable repeating here). I found this interesting because recently in Hall County, Georgia my husband and I traveled on Jim Crow Road. And this is not something that county officials have simply overlooked, because they proudly advertise the road as the location of a park and regional tennis center on this website. Now, whether the road is named after a person named Jim Crow, or after the pervasive and violent Southern system of racial segregation, to have a place name like this extant in 2011 seems tone deaf at best. Perhaps my perception is colored by the fact that we represent an African-American neighborhood in Gainesville/Hall County that was established under racial segregation in the 1930s and is still suffering separate, and unequal, treatment to this day. (My previous posts on this work are available here.)
Jamie Baker Roskie
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/land_use/2011/10/racist-place-names.html