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City report on Confederate monuments raises idea of renaming Austin


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3 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

I'm good with Waterloo.  Maybe we can convince Bastrop or Dripping Springs to rename themselves to "Austin" out of protest of us ditching the name, leading to Californians being confused and moving out to one of those places and ignoring the big-ass city of Waterloo that seemingly sprang out of nowhere.

Maybe let Beaumont change its name to Austin?

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I don't live too far from Plantation Road, so I'm familiar with the neighborhood. It's located about halfway between Wm. Cannon and Slaughter to the north and south; the neighborhood is tucked between Brodie on the west and West Gate to the east.

Very few people know this, but it was once a freedman's town called Kincheonville. There are still remnants of the village in the form of an old street grid, even though it eventually got swallowed by Austin in the 1970s. Those streets are, I assume, named for the founding Kincheon family. So, there's Thomas Kincheon, Dalton, Elija,  Blumie, and Minnie. There are even a couple old African American churches in this otherwise very suburban neighborhood.

But here's the deal. When the 1970s portion of the neighborhood was built, the developer named a few streets that recalled slavery. For example, the Plantation Rd. mentioned in the article. There are also Oak Alley and Dunliegh, plantation names in Louisiana and Mississippi respectively, as well as a Harpers Ferry.

Now, I don't know if renaming the streets is the right thing to do and it certainly wouldn't be convenient for residents. But can we at least acknowledge that, in this one instance, the developer seemed to be intentionally pouring salt in the wound? Maybe I'm overly sensitive to "white guilt." But as long as I've lived in this part of town (since '04), I've always found that naming the streets after plantations in a former freedman's town was an especially shitty thing to do.

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6 hours ago, Xian said:

seems the people who argued taking down down the statues was a slippery slope might have been correct. 

Renaming the Austin thing is crazy and will never happen. 

Just the opposite; that it will never happen means they weren't correct.

While there will always be nuts supporting any crazy cause, most people are against renaming shit and removing monuments to people who, although they may have had slaves or supported slavery, were being honored for things having nothing to do with slavery.    The successful push has been to remove monuments that literally honor people for defending slavery.   Clear dividing line.   And, as Austin isn't named in tribute to the defense of slavery, it's not at risk, just like Washington isn't changing. 

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"I'm not going to waste my time screaming at a neo-Nazi who's going to hate me no matter what," said Barkley, who recently anchored a TNT mini-series about issues pertaining to race in the United States. "What we as black people need to do — we need to worry about getting our education, we need to stop killing each other, we need to try to find a way to have more economic opportunity and things like that." 

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9 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:

You’re correct. Can we change the lake back to town lake then when we rename Austin after that missing atheist lady?

She's not missing. She dead. The found her chopped up corpse (along with her son's) in 2001, six years after the vanished. 

7 hours ago, CooterBrown said:

Can’t we just change it to L’Austin so both blacks and whites can be happy?

Very very racist. D'Austin might be better .

6 hours ago, Deej said:

Seems odd to be worried about offending the minorities Austin is so desperately trying to push out.

A thousand times this. Everywhere I know of where this is going on, the neighborhood or city is been hoity-toitied to fuck. "Hey we cleared out the whole neighborhood where family had been living since Juneteenth +1, and it's all been replaced with condos, luxury apartment complex, dog salons, and cat coffeehouses, but I'll tell you what -- we'll change the name of that school your kids now live too far away from to attend."

6 hours ago, LongestHorn said:

I'm clearly biased, but in the spirit of our founding fathers naming conventions, New Austin is the only acceptable alternative. 

I can do you one better: Welcome to Woke Austin.  

 

4 hours ago, Mojo Hand said:

  The successful push has been to remove monuments that literally honor people for defending slavery.   Clear dividing line.   And, as Austin isn't named in tribute to the defense of slavery, it's not at risk, just like Washington isn't changing. 

Houston HISD changed the name of Henry Grady Junior High. Grady did not serve in the Confederate amy -- he we was a kid when the Civil War ended. Some of his later writings had some racist passages but it was a rare 1880s scribbler who did not. 

In that wave of monument removals, they got rid of some obvious choices: Lee, Davis, Jackson, and Dick Dowling, who at least had a case as a prominent Houstonian. All of those guys not only served in the CS army, but also led men into battle of presided over the entire short-lived attempt at a nation.

I've got no problems with any of that save for Dowling, who like him or not, was homegrown and widely considered a bigger hero to locals than even Sam Houston until about 1920 or so. In the end, though, it was shitty that the jr high that bore his name was something like 99.9 percent black and brown. (It's also VY's alma mater, but was there a campaign to rename it after him? Nooooooooo....)

If HISD had called it a day then and there, fine. But, of course, they did not. Also on the chopping block: Sidney Lanier, a teenaged private when he enlisted in the rebel army, worked in the signal corps, and spent much of the war in a Yankee POW camp. Clearly no combat-tested badass or leader of men. His fame comes from his postwar career as a poet and musician / composer. 

Who is honored with renamed school? That would be former Houston mayor Bob Lanier, a white dude who got the ball rolling on erasing Houston's Freedmans Town from the map. It had survived against all odds in the shadow of downtown for about 125 years, but then Good Ol' Boy Bob called in some chits and now there is almost nothing of it left. See my reply to @Deej above. 

Somehow the HISD brainiacs omitted changing the name of Oran Roberts Elem, even though he was a colonel in the CS army and freaking presided over the Texas Secession Convention.

While it might have been an oversight at first, I am 100 percent certain they know about the Roberts exception now.

Tl; dr:

HISD claimed it was solely about Confederate leaders, only people whose names you know via the war.  

And yet they gave a pass to one of Texas's most renowned rebel leaders. They changed another that honored a journalist / news magnate who was 14 when the war ended, and another, Lanier, who seems like he was an average at best soldier and after the war, pretty much what we today would call a hippy -- hardly any Southern men of his time wrote poetry or played music. Maybe Sidney Lanier was gay? Maybe the school would still be named after him if only he'd been woke enough to come out of the closet in 1873?

Sorry for the long-winded response, but to your point, Mojo, Houston's round of iconoclasm set a few shitty precedents.

 

 

 

3 hours ago, Anastasis said:

 


Won’t work either. Made money off slave trade.

 

No: it's worse. He had slaves.  

All of that said, I don't think this can happen, but if Austin were to be the first domino of his kind to fall in Texas, it would be open season on pretty much every Texan born before 1850 or so...Austin introduced slaves into colony, and pretty much every prominent family in Texas up to Fort Sumter had slaves or benefited greatly from a slave economy. 

You can remove the telling of history from books, you can topple the display of history in the public arena, but you can't remake the facts. We can go back and erase the 19th Century. On that note, I am for the tit for tat measure. There should be a monument to evils of slavery near all of those dudes' statues, or on the campuses of their schools, and that monument should make it plain that slavery was the hill the entire South chose to die on.

 

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5 hours ago, MaybeACoordinator said:

You can remove the telling of history from books, you can topple the display of history in the public arena, but you can't remake the facts. We can go back and erase the 19th Century. On that note, I am for the tit for tat measure. There should be a monument to evils of slavery near all of those dudes' statues, or on the campuses of their schools, and that monument should make it plain that slavery was the hill the entire South chose to die on.

 

I'm a big believer in the importance of knowing and understanding history. I read a lot and try to learn as much as possible because I believe it informs the present and I think it benefits society for people to know their past.

A monument to slaves, slavery, and abolition is absolutely worthwhile. And if that would be enough to stop the whitewashing (NPI) of our history then even better still.

What troubles me the most is that previous generations tried - and achieved, mostly - to put the Civil War behind them and reconcile into one nation.
The Memorial Day parade in 1915 where CSA and USA vets marched together. The 1938 75th anniversary of Gettysburg where again veterans from both sides met and socialized for several days, presided over by FDR are just two examples. Those were important gestures and much was said about moving on, putting the past behind us, and building a future together.

Southern racists intent on division did put up some monuments to the Civil War to make a statement about white superiority. 
But instead of trashing all of our monuments and namesakes, fomenting bad tempers and division, hollow gestures - why not appropriate those monuments to reflect the perils of division? What it cost our country in that war? The importance of reconciliation and unity?

It seems like any politician with a modicum of sense should be more interested in unity than division, right? Or is that naive?

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5 hours ago, MaybeACoordinator said:

She's not missing. She dead. The found her chopped up corpse (along with her son's) in 2001, six years after the vanished. 

Very very racist. D'Austin might be better .

A thousand times this. Everywhere I know of where this is going on, the neighborhood or city is been hoity-toitied to fuck. "Hey we cleared out the whole neighborhood where family had been living since Juneteenth +1, and it's all been replaced with condos, luxury apartment complex, dog salons, and cat coffeehouses, but I'll tell you what -- we'll change the name of that school your kids now live too far away from to attend."

I can do you one better: Welcome to Woke Austin.  

 

Houston HISD changed the name of Henry Grady Junior High. Grady did not serve in the Confederate amy -- he we was a kid when the Civil War ended. Some of his later writings had some racist passages but it was a rare 1880s scribbler who did not. 

In that wave of monument removals, they got rid of some obvious choices: Lee, Davis, Jackson, and Dick Dowling, who at least had a case as a prominent Houstonian. All of those guys not only served in the CS army, but also led men into battle of presided over the entire short-lived attempt at a nation.

I've got no problems with any of that save for Dowling, who like him or not, was homegrown and widely considered a bigger hero to locals than even Sam Houston until about 1920 or so. In the end, though, it was shitty that the jr high that bore his name was something like 99.9 percent black and brown. (It's also VY's alma mater, but was there a campaign to rename it after him? Nooooooooo....)

If HISD had called it a day then and there, fine. But, of course, they did not. Also on the chopping block: Sidney Lanier, a teenaged private when he enlisted in the rebel army, worked in the signal corps, and spent much of the war in a Yankee POW camp. Clearly no combat-tested badass or leader of men. His fame comes from his postwar career as a poet and musician / composer. 

Who is honored with renamed school? That would be former Houston mayor Bob Lanier, a white dude who got the ball rolling on erasing Houston's Freedmans Town from the map. It had survived against all odds in the shadow of downtown for about 125 years, but then Good Ol' Boy Bob called in some chits and now there is almost nothing of it left. See my reply to @Deej above. 

Somehow the HISD brainiacs omitted changing the name of Oran Roberts Elem, even though he was a colonel in the CS army and freaking presided over the Texas Secession Convention.

While it might have been an oversight at first, I am 100 percent certain they know about the Roberts exception now.

Tl; dr:

HISD claimed it was solely about Confederate leaders, only people whose names you know via the war.  

And yet they gave a pass to one of Texas's most renowned rebel leaders. They changed another that honored a journalist / news magnate who was 14 when the war ended, and another, Lanier, who seems like he was an average at best soldier and after the war, pretty much what we today would call a hippy -- hardly any Southern men of his time wrote poetry or played music. Maybe Sidney Lanier was gay? Maybe the school would still be named after him if only he'd been woke enough to come out of the closet in 1873?

Sorry for the long-winded response, but to your point, Mojo, Houston's round of iconoclasm set a few shitty precedents.

 

 

 

No: it's worse. He had slaves.  

All of that said, I don't think this can happen, but if Austin were to be the first domino of his kind to fall in Texas, it would be open season on pretty much every Texan born before 1850 or so...Austin introduced slaves into colony, and pretty much every prominent family in Texas up to Fort Sumter had slaves or benefited greatly from a slave economy. 

You can remove the telling of history from books, you can topple the display of history in the public arena, but you can't remake the facts. We can go back and erase the 19th Century. On that note, I am for the tit for tat measure. There should be a monument to evils of slavery near all of those dudes' statues, or on the campuses of their schools, and that monument should make it plain that slavery was the hill the entire South chose to die on.

 

I don't see why Grady not participating in the Civil War is so significant to you; that's not the only way someone can have a distasteful legacy.   As far as I can tell, his main relevance to Texas was his racist post-War actions.   I agree that changing Lanier wouldn't be justified purely by his participation in the Confederate Army, although I'm not sure that's really what happened.   I'll amend my take to include people who aren't significant enough for their names to survive when school names are being reevaluated.  Some of them might get caught in the crossfire, like Lanier, but the Bob Lanier compromise pretty much reflects that nobody gave much of a shit either way about it.

And look, maybe in 100 years, a guy from Austin leads the successful rebellion against our alien overlords and the city gets renamed for him. That's just how it goes.  

If you actually care about the name and legacy of honorees from long ago, do something to actually make people today think they're worth honoring for positive reasons.  As significant (and relatively woke on slavery) as he was, Hamilton probably gets spiked from the ten without the happenstance of a timely and awesome Broadway musical, simply because most people didn't know much about him.  If more than a handful of Texans gave the slightest shit about Lanier, his first name would still be on the building, and that's the real reason he didn't survive, IMO. 

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17 minutes ago, Ghost of LL said:

Does it matter that the report didn't actually suggest renaming the city?  Because that seems like a kind of important point amidst all the pearl-clutching.

The fact that the city's name was even included on a list of names "that require more analysis" is more than reason enough to call out city officials for their dumbassery. Just because it's unlikely to happen doesn't mean they shouldn't be criticized for wasting time and money on silly shit like this, as if there aren't actual problems to address.

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32 minutes ago, Ghost of LL said:

Does it matter that the report didn't actually suggest renaming the city?  Because that seems like a kind of important point amidst all the pearl-clutching.

it just means that the report is like most government reports, and I saw a shitton of them in my career.

That is, useless wastes of trees the bureaucrats produce or no apparent purpose or benefit.

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6 minutes ago, Paco said:

Well if they change it to Waterloo I hope our airport code is WAT.

Waterloo is a battle where Brits and Dutch (who all got rich off the sugar island slave trade) teamed up with Prussians (who all later became Nazis and Performance Artists) to short-shame a feisty go-getter from Europe's impoverished south.

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37 minutes ago, PvilleStang said:

Our tax dollars at work: The Austin Equity Office

image.png

And that doesn't count the budget, rather just 3 of their 5 salaries.

Ironic that the “Chief Equity Officer” makes 3x the salary of his (female) assistant. I’m sure he feels really, really guilty about it.

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23 hours ago, Neonmoon said:

Even if I lived on David Duke road, the mere thought of having to update or get new documents like a Driver License, Credit Cards, Passport, work pay stubs, mailings, benefits, banks document, mortgage document, etc. makes me want to commit suicide 

I think this renaming business is complete nonsense, but this is the weakest of any argument opposing it.  This is the same thing anyone who moves has to deal with, on top of packing, hauling, and unpacking their shit.   If this makes you want to commit suicide, you've lived a rather charmed life. 

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10 minutes ago, Samson's Wig said:

I think this renaming business is complete nonsense, but this is the weakest of any argument opposing it.  This is the same thing anyone who moves has to deal with, on top of packing, hauling, and unpacking their shit.   If this makes you want to commit suicide, you've lived a rather charmed life. 

i have a friend who lives on one of the two streets that was renamed.  it's a nightmare.  mail not getting delivered b/c systems can't reconcile the old name vs the new name.  credit cards getting cancelled because they trip fraud alerts.  mortgage payments, bill payments, and paychecks not going through because the new address doesn't match what differing gvt agencies have on record even AFTER several calls have been made.  it's not as simple as going in to a system and changing a name. 

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10 minutes ago, Macanudo said:

This dude is as C-level as Colorado.

Well, his resume is a long way from mind-blowing, but he does have a masters degree, and doesn't exactly make private sector C-level money, whereas his secretary graduated from high school and makes more than almost all AISD teachers.

Let's not get too crazy with our faux outrage here.

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Quote

For that reason, the city of Austin’s Equity Office suggested renaming the city in a report about existing Confederate monuments that was published this week.

Uh, no it didn't, at least I can't find it in the report linked in the article.  Nowhere is it "suggested" that Austin be renamed.

What the report did was identify as Medium priority the city name (that's page 21), which I'd agree it is. Do nothing with it, but know that there is some history behind it.

And since its a 'Assets for Secondary Review' the recommendation was 'Get input from Council on the desire to address secondary assets that were identified' (pg 3).

They kinda of misreported what the report actually said (I know, big suprise) and it did exactly what they wanted it to, get everybody all spun up.

 

 

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3 hours ago, Ghost of LL said:

Does it matter that the report didn't actually suggest renaming the city?  Because that seems like a kind of important point amidst all the pearl-clutching.

Nope. Gotta freak out over it, without actually reading the report. Its the way people are these days. Always looking for the sound bite without researching.

Edited by relapse98
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10 minutes ago, relapse98 said:

Nope. Gotta freak out over it, without actually reading the report. Its the way people are these days. Always looking for the sound bite without researching.

I'll respond to this as soon as I find an appropriate meme.

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4 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

Well, his resume is a long way from mind-blowing, but he does have a masters degree, and doesn't exactly make private sector C-level money, whereas his secretary graduated from high school and makes more than almost all AISD teachers.

Let's not get too crazy with our faux outrage here.

Sounds like the Austin Equity Office has some serious work to do

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