In the latest installment of “The Summer of Eliminating Any Semblance of Confederate History,” a Florida mayor proposed and succeeded in changing the “racist” Old Dixie highway to President Barack Obama Highway.
In a Riviera Beach City Council meeting on Wednesday, council members voted in favor of Mayor Thomas Masters, who proposed the change to the highway on the claim that it still “invokes memories of racism and slavery in the Old South.”
According to reports by local a NBC affiliate, the vote was closer than the mayor expected.
Masters said he “got a little worried for a minute,” as some argued that Obama hasn’t done enough for race relations in America to deserve to have his name on the highway.
“It makes you want to cry because it could be better than what is it,” said one resident speaking publicly at the meeting.
Another local woman who has lived in the area since the 1960s and wished to remain anonymous, said the highway name and the history it evokes doesn’t bother her, and it’s not the changing of the highway’s name but who it is changing it for that should be in question.
“What we do we have to show for Barack Obama on Old Dixie?” she asked.
Despite the vocalized concerns of citizens and suggestions for naming it after someone else than the sitting president, the proposition was passed with a last minute addition of the word “President” in front of Barack Obama Highway, just in case it ever got mixed up with another Obama.