Posted on 10/12/2017 6:43:36 PM PDT by Olog-hai
After years of debate, a U.S. government board has voted to rename Utah’s Negro Bill Canyon, overruling a recommendation by Utah officials to keep the name.
The U.S. Board on Geographic Names decided Thursday to rename it Grandstaff Canyon to get rid of an offensive name, The Salt Lake Tribune reports. The vote was 12-0, with one member declining to vote. The decision comes 16 years after the board voted to keep the name.
The new name honors black rancher and prospector William Grandstaff, whose cattle grazed there in the 1870s. “His name was Grandstaff; it was not Negro Bill,” said Wendi-Starr Brown, a member of the federal board who is Native American. “I’m pretty sure that’s not how he wanted to be addressed in life.” Brown is a member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe, who represents the Bureau of Indian Affairs on the federal board. […]
The NAACP said the name is not offensive and preserves the history of the site, while the Utah Martin Luther King Jr. Commission called the name “blatant racism.”
The canyon is home to a popular hiking spot in Moab, the gateway to stunning, massive red rock formations. Local officials and business owners have long said the name generates frequent complaints and outcry from tourists who come from around the world, lured by the red-rock landscapes in nearby national parks. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
Grandstaff?
Does that mean it’s true what they say about Negro Bill?
Please remove all Negroes from our history. Thank you, SJWs.
Lemme know when you’re done, idiots.
I suspect the canyon has had a name change before this, considering the common language back then.
I imagine that so long as one said it friendly-like he didn’t mind. It probably served to distinguish him from all of the non-Negro Bills around at the time.
Good for the NAACP.
That name just makes me laugh.
Complainers should just be glad they haven’t been calling it
“N***r Bill Canyon”. That was the common slang back then.
So when does the government vote to rename the United Negro College Fund?
More unconstitutional power grabs by the illegal feds. Nowhere does the Constitution give the feds authority to name much less own state lands.
When will We the People take back OUR country from the illegal tyrants in Washington?
Yea, they always said he was hunged.
“Grandstaff?
Does that mean it’s true what they say about Negro Bill?”
—
I asked Lily Von Shtupp:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLDnPiXyME0
I guess I better clean out the woodpile
So when does the government vote to rename the United Negro College Fund?
Turns out
“A mind is a terrible thing to waste” is all to true.
We had a similar issue with Negro Mountain in Western Maryland; changing the name was voted down. Even some Black people, including historians, want to keep it because it honors a man’s bravery:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negro_Mountain
Grandstaff?.....its just another neutral name without meaning....
my opinion is certainly "wrong" but I think some of these traditional names tell more of America's story than some neutral name that signifies little of the history...
We used to hunt an area of the Cascades near Mt. Adams in Washington State called Ni**erhead Creek back in the 60’s. It was on the map but subsequently renamed Yellowjacket Creek - back in the early logging days, a ni**erhead referred to the giant steam donkey winches used in timber operations and other industries.
“So when does the government vote to rename the United Negro College Fund?”
==
I dunno, maybe it’s too busy re-editing past Presidential news conferences -
“President John F. Kennedy on Negro Civil Rights in Albany, Georgia, August 1, 1962”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b00JTFwLc1k
I’m with you on that - Negro Bill - interesting. Grandstaff Canyon doesn’t do anything for me, however, I am glad at least they still honored Negro Bill by still naming the canyon after him but in the future we will never know that it was named after a black man. No one will bother to find out.
As soon as they ban Spanish speakers from using their word for the color black.
Bump
Sounds like they are trying to erase the great history of the black cowboy of the old west. Most of the cowboys were blacks - or Negros as they were called then.
Bass Reeves, one of the most famed U.S. Marshals was a Negro. There seems to be overwhelming evidence that he is the one that the Lone Ranger was modeled after.
Hmm - I wonder if calling a Negro back then a “black man” would be offensive. Like calling a white person “pale face”.
FROM THE WEB:
The word Negro was adopted from Spanish and Portuguese and first recorded from the mid 16th century. It remained the standard term throughout the 17th–19th centuries and was used by prominent black American campaigners such as W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington in the early 20th century. Since the Black Power movement of the 1960s, however, when the term black was favoured as the term to express racial pride, Negro (together with related words such as Negress) has dropped out of favour and now seems out of date or even offensive in both British and US English
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.