POLL: LR officials weigh renaming Confederate Boulevard

LITTLE ROCK — While only a short stretch of Confederate Boulevard remains, to some it is a glaring reminder of Little Rock's checkered racial past.

City officials are expected to consider a petition Thursday to rename the boulevard's last few blocks after one of the area's first black property owners. Coincidentally, the planning commission's vote comes 58 years to the day that 1,200 troops arrived to escort nine black students to their first day of class during the integration of Central High School.

While many debates over Southern symbols are decades old, others have emerged in the months since nine black church members were shot and killed this summer at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. The white man charged in the killings, Dylann Roof, posted photos before the shooting of himself with a Confederate flag and symbols associated with white supremacy.

Since then, South Carolina removed the Confederate flag from its State House and Memphis, Tennessee, voted to remove from a public park a statue of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, an early leader in the Ku Klux Klan.

Anika Whitfield, an organizer of the name change effort, helped gather the necessary 10 signatures from the 20 property owners along Confederate Boulevard to have the petition considered by the Planning Commission.

"Something that seems so benign can be very malignant in our community," Whitfield said. "We have to see that, yes, some things are historical because they happened, but they're not beneficial for us and our future ... and becoming fortified."

The Little Rock Board of Directors, the city's elected council, will eventually have the final say after the commission makes its recommendation.