The city is starting a process that could change two Phoenix street names long criticized as offensive and racist.
The Phoenix City Council is initiating a process to change the names of Robert E. Lee Street and Squaw Peak Drive in north Phoenix, Mayor Kate Gallego tweeted on Thursday.
Both street names are widely considered offensive — squaw is a derogatory word for Native American women and Robert E. Lee was the commander of the Confederate Army in the Civil War.
“Working with my fellow council-members we’ve moved to initiate the process for changing the offensive Phoenix street names of Robert E. Lee St. and Squaw Peak Dr. We will work with neighbors and city staff to start this process on July 1,” the tweet read.
A 2017 policy change allows the city to rename derogatory or controversial street names without resident approval.
How the process will work
The City Council will vote on July 1 to initiate the process. If the council approves, the city Planning and Development Department would conduct a review of the street names, including considering comments from the U.S. Postal Service and the fire, police, water and street transportation departments.
Within 21 days of City Council's approval, the Planning and Development Department will mail the first notice to affected residents, businesses and property owners to inform them of the proposal to change the name of their street, according to the city policy.
Phoenix would be required to hold two community meetings for residents to have their say, but ultimately council members would decide.
Within 90 days of the request, an item on the proposed street name change will be placed on a council meeting agenda, the policy says.
Two weeks before that meeting, affected residents will received a second mail notice informing them of the date, time and location of the council meeting.
If the name change is approved, city of Phoenix fees related to changing a street name would be waived for all affected property owners.
The Planning and Development Department would notify all needed services of the change, including the Postal Service and the city's police, fire, city clerk, finance, law, water services, street transportation and neighborhood services departments, the policy says.
The Maricopa County Recorder, Maricopa County Assessor, Arizona Public Service, Salt River Project, Southwest Gas, Cox Communications, Century Link, Federal Express, United Parcel Service, and private mapping services such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, MapQuest and Wide World of Maps also would be notified about the change, the policy says.
Citizen petition drive launched
Less than a week ago, Phoenix resident Ryan Wampler created a change.org petition to change the name of Robert E. Lee Street. At the time of this writing, it had nearly 2,500 signatures.
Wampler said he created the petition as a small way to help the Black Lives Matter movement, which was reignited in Phoenix and all over the world after George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis.
“We need to show our fellow Black Phoenicians that we care about them and they shouldn’t have to be driving down a road seeing something that is so offensive to them, and a part of our history,” Wampler said.
No name change efforts for 3 years
Although Robert E. Lee Street has received a lot of new attention since the petition was created, it’s not the first time the issue has been brought to the City Council.
In June 2017, Phoenix City Council voted to 6-3 to amend its policy to allow them to rename streets with “offensive or derogatory” titles without the support of 75 percent or more of the affected property owners, as previously required.
However, the change was largely pushed by then-Mayor Greg Stanton, who specifically wanted to change Robert E. Lee Street and Squaw Peak Drive.
Stanton, now a U.S. representative, resigned to run for Congress soon after the policy change.
In the three years since, no attempt has been made by the council to change the names.
Under the amended policy, the mayor or three council members can ask the city manager to pursue changes in situations where a name might be deemed offensive or derogatory.
No requests have been made in the past three years, according to the City Manager's Office.
Mayor Kate Gallego was on the council at that time, and she voted to approve the policy. She had taken no action since then.
Asked why she is choosing to make this move now, Annie DeGraw, her communications director, sent an email response: “The Mayor has only been in office since March 2019 and has faced the challenges of COVID, homelessness, police modernizations, housing affordability, and more. She has worked to make huge changes in all those areas and has done more in the last year than many do in the entirety of their time in public service. This is the next area of change she is working on.”
District 1 Councilperson Thelda Williams said after the council last voted on the issue in 2017, it “disappeared” and wasn’t brought up again.
Williams was one of the three council members who voted against the change, saying at the time it was because residents in the area were concerned about what it would cost them to change their addresses. This time she said she would support it.
“I’m agreeable to it if the residents are agreeable to it,” Williams said. “I understand it’s complicated to change everything, but I also understand it’s a new day in the world, and if a majority of people want to change it, I will support it.”
What residents, advocates say
In 2017, the name-change policy did face a lot of opposition, almost entirely from the residents living on the streets.
Residents along Squaw Peak Drive, a short residential road in east Phoenix, were outspoken against the change. Sixteen out of 20 of the homeowners signed a petition urging the council to keep the name.
It's unclear how many residents living on Robert E. Lee Street opposed a name change. The street is a mostly residential northeast Phoenix roadway with about 85 homes, two small apartment complexes and a charter school.
Neal Burgis,of Burgis Successful Solutions, has lived on Robert E. Lee Street with his wife for 27 years. They originally had concerns about buying the home because of the street name, he said, and they would be happy to see it changed.
Burgis runs his business from home so the name change would mean he'd have to change his letterhead and get new business cards, but he said he wouldn't mind that very much.
"For the name of the street to change, the people who live on Robert E. Lee Street should have the opportunity to choose what that new name will be," Burgis said.
If possible, Burgis said he would like to see a new street name that's shorter, simple and "blends in" with the surrounding streets, which he doesn't think the current name does.
Jamaar Williams, a Phoenix native, an organizer for Black Lives Matter Phoenix-Metro and a member of the Black Abolitionists Collaborative, said while Gallego's announcement is a welcome gesture, it’s “bittersweet that the mayor is taking that initiative at this time” when she’s had the opportunity to do so for a long time.
“The mayor too often feels like it’s best practice to stay silent on these issues or sit on this moderate fence so she doesn’t offend anyone, and it’s beyond frustrating to keep having to see that,” Williams said.
While the gesture will be appreciated by Black Phoenicians, Williams said he hopes council members know they’re only scratching the surface of addressing racism.
“Changing the names of some streets is great, but what’s the plan for addressing systemic racism in our city?” he asked. “I would like them to actually have the ingenuity they promised us, the forward thinking they promised us, and to help us start thinking of a future where we are not spending $745 million on a brutally violent police force.”
'Words matter. Names matter.'
The two street names and whether they are offensive or derogatory has been a source of debate for years.
Native Americans have long fought to rename Squaw Peak Drive, which is at the base of one of the state’s most popular hiking destinations, Piestewa Peak. It was formerly known as Squaw Peak.
State officials renamed the peak after fallen soldier Lori Piestewa in 2003, when she was killed in Iraq and became the first American Indian woman to die in combat serving with the U.S. military. Many protested the name change at the time and said the peak should keep its old name or be named in honor of all veterans. Federal recognition of the change didn’t come until 2008.
Historians and Native Americans have varying interpretations of the word squaw and its origins. Some say it’s a derogatory word for female anatomy, while others say the origin wasn’t negative and was simply a way to refer to Native women, but the word took on new meaning as white settlers used it as a pejorative.
Native American women, the group targeted by the word, have been adamant about renaming the street.
In January 2017, the female leaders of several prominent Native American organizations, including the Phoenix Indian Center and the Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, wrote a letter urging the city to change the name.
“Whatever the origins of this word, it has come to represent a time and mindset when speaking in a pejorative sense about American Indian women was acceptable,” they wrote. “We no longer live in that time. Words matter. Names matter.”
Black leaders in Phoenix have also long been adamant that changing the name of Robert E. Lee Street would send an important message to Phoenix residents about the legacy of slavery.
In 2017, state Rep. Reginald Bolding, D-Phoenix, said the street names are “designed to tear our community apart.”
“The Confederacy represented hate, it represented slavery … Robert E. Lee is a reminder of that dark time in American history,” he said at the 2017 City Council meeting about the proposed change.
Williams, who was born and raised in Phoenix, said he never took much notice of Robert E. Lee Street or the Confederate memorials in Phoenix until he was a young adult. When he did, he was baffled by the “absurdity” of it, and he couldn’t understand what purpose they served.
“Do we just not know about our history or are we just choosing to celebrate it, despite its meaning to a lot of people in our communities?” Williams asked.
The Confederate monument is Wesley Bolin plaza, a gift from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, was erected in 1961, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Although Robert E. Lee Street isn’t credited to anyone, it was also named in 1961, almost a century after the Civil War ended and at the dawn of the civil rights movement.
“There is, at certain times, this paralyzing frustration that someone thought that this was valuable enough, that this was important enough to spend however much money to build this or put it here,” Williams said. “They were either wholly disregarding what this might mean to people who are indigenous to this land or people whose ancestors were enslaved on this land, or doing it intentionally as some sort of cruel joke … it’s hard to understand how that could be any other way but intentional.”
While some Phoenicians view Confederate monuments and street names as an acknowledgement of an important era in our country’s history, Williams said that for black and brown residents, it is a “grotesque reminder” of the violence and inhumanity people have faced solely because of their skin color.
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