Valdosta Residents Want to Rename Street for Barack Obama
The civil rights group needs to get 60 percent of Forrest Street’s residents to sign a petition before they bring the proposal to change it in honor of Obama before City Council.
Charles Rex Arbogast / Associated Press
A civil rights group in Valdosta wants to change one of the south Georgia city’s streets to Barack Obama Boulevard.
Back in 2014, a local racial justice group, the Mary Turner Project published research on several Valdosta streets named for slaveowners. The list included Forrest Street, named after Confederate General and subsequent Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Now, a Valdosta civil rights group, the People’s Tribunal, wants to rename it for former President Barack Obama. The Rev. Floyd Rose, the group’s president, said this is the first time they’ve tried to change a street name, but there are others around town.
“We want to do one at a time,” he said. “We want to get Barack Obama’s name down first.”
Mark George is with the Mary Turner Project, which did the original research.
“The two streets that run north and south, the main roads through Valdosta are Patterson and Ashley Streets, and they both were Confederate veterans who were both slaveowners,” he said.
“Most of the streets here are named after either former slaveowners or Confederate generals,” Rose said. He pointed out that his own church is on Lee Street, named for Robert E. Lee.
George said it’s hard to tell why now is the time some of his group’s research is catching on.
“There are just factors that we can’t predict. Maybe the work that we did and others did as well is just coming to fruition. Maybe those seeds are starting to sprout,” he said. “So we made this known back then. We challenged the city on a number of occasions and invited them to events and so forth, and they kind of never showed up.”
The People’s Tribunal needs to get 60 percent of Forrest Street’s residents to sign the petition to bring it before City Council. Rose said as of Monday, they had about 40 percent, and hope to get the rest by Tuesday morning. Rose said they’ve only had one person refuse to sign so far.
Donald Davis, director of the Lowndes County Historical Society said there could be evidence the street was named for Elbert Forrest, a black businessman, but he hasn’t found the primary sources proving that himself.
“From the materials in our archives, we cannot say who the street is named for, and we cannot say who it is not named for,” he said.
George said his group did find the documents proving the source of the name.
“Specifically when that street was named, too, black folks weren’t having streets named after them, I can assure you,” he said.
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