Thursday, March 28, 2024

VIDEO: NAACP, Lawmakers in Baytown, TX Pushing to Rename Negrohead Lake

negrohead lake
Negrohead Lake – Baytown, TX

*Several community leaders in Houston, and now several members of the U.S. Congress, are pushing to rename Negrohead Lake in Baytown, TX.

NAACP President Dr. James Dixon said the name is embarrassing and an affront to citizens whose tax dollars are used to maintain the lake.

“This is derogatory to our children and it fuels and perpetuates that racism is okay,” Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis said at a news conference Monday.

“Initially, they used the N word that I won’t use on television,” Ellis said.

This battle actually began more than 30 years ago. Ellis, then a state senator, co-sponsored a bill to remove racially offensive names from publicly owned property in Texas. “It’s hard to change people’s heart,” Ellis said. “The bill was approved in Texas but became difficult to pass on the federal level.”

The NAACP wants the name changed to Henry Doyle Lake after the first black graduate of TSU’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law.

Now, congressional leaders have joined the fight.

“I find the utilization of the word “negro” to denote a person of African ancestry to be greatly offensive,” U.S. Rep. Al Green said. “It connotes a caricature of human inferiority reminiscent of a bygone era when blackness was defined by a predominantly white power structure.”

“If we are a people that don’t remember our history – and that is of people of all colors – we are doomed to repeat the ugliness of racism again,” U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said.

Baytown Mayor Brandon Capetillo said he’s also on board, vowing city council will discuss a resolution to support the new name on Thursday.

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names will have the final say.

Watch below:

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