Dear Editor:
What causes my hackles to stand up is that amid the growing push to eradicate Confederate memorials and monuments from public parks and courthouse lawns. There is a call in Kansas City, Missouri, to step up and rename The Paseo for Martin Luther King Jr., to foster multicultural inclusion.
Regarding the Feb. 25, 2000, Post-Tribune front page story concerning the city renaming Lafayette Street to Martin Luther King Avenue, it gave me a nasty foreboding feeling at first, but I recognize that it is another nail in the coffin that is stifling American history in our country today.
King's actions were also called too aggressive, too disruptive and said to drive people to violent uprising. It is only through the whitewashing of our history books that MLK's actions have been praised as peaceful. It is striking how few cities have actiually engaged in the place renaming that would topple these racist images.
In fact, some states such as Tennessee have recently passed "heritage protection" laws that cold clearly limit the rewriting of racialized street names as well as impede the removal of Confederate memorials and monuments." - The Denver Post, 2016
I say that to remove the symobols of our past is to attempt to not only revise history, but even worseto erase history. Revising and erasing history is un-American and reeks of former and present-day fascist and communist countries or regimes. We cannot erase our history, and we should never want to do so. Darrell Maples, 2015.
Using racism as an excuse to renaming hisgtorical streets after black people in areas in which to question the absense of their culture and heritage within may cause fear and hate between the races and who will pay for it? there is more profitable endeavors for example, the war against crime, hunter, illiteracy and poverty. No public place should be renamed if the present name has attainted a degree of historical association and has develped an importance of its own.
"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been retirttten, every picture has been repainted, every stature and street building has been renamed, every date has been alteredHistory has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right." - George Orwell.