Confederate Monuments Are Coming Down, Are Streets And Highways Next?

The bureaucratic red tape that normally prevents politicians from rapidly changing their cityscapes is falling away as protesters demanding racial justice insist that Confederate monuments be swept into the dustbin of history.

But more than bronze statues are being discarded. The University of Kentucky announced Friday that it would remove a controversial mural of enslaved Africans and Native Americans from its walls. In Louisiana, Nicholls State University officials have also scrapped the names of two college buildings dedicated to Confederate generals. And an hour’s drive away in New Orleans, city lawmakers are preparing to rename Jefferson Davis Parkway after Norman C. Francis, a civil rights pioneer who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006.

“Our streets and shared rights of way are littered with vestiges of a racist past,” said New Orleans Council member Jason Williams in a statement to NPR. “We cannot allow honors given to war criminals to remain when the people who bestowed those honors don’t represent our values.”

The renewed sense of urgency has been fueled by George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer now charged with murder. Motivated by civil unrest, politicians are now scrambling to make good on years-old promises to remove statues and other subtle homages to the Confederacy from their streets.