Title

January 2018: Dallas Streets Named After a Confederate or Klan Figure

Creator

Preview

Creation Date

2018-01-16

Description

Undergraduate senior Brooke Robinson created this map under the supervision of Prof. Euan Hague. Hague was contacted by his Dallas-based coauthor, Edward H. Sebesta. Sebesta is working with a group of activists to “de-Confederate” Dallas. Researching the imprint of the Confederacy on Dallas beyond statues (such as one of Robert E. Lee that the city was pressured to remove in 2017), Sebesta and colleagues drew on the cultural geographical literature discussing the role of street-naming to develop a plan to identify streets in Dallas named after Confederate leaders and members of the Ku Klux Klan. As Prof. Euan Hague has written in the past, “The names that a community gives to streets, parks and schools can reveal much about what and who its members value.” Using a base layer from Open Street Map, and emphasizing routes in Adobe Photoshop, Brooke drew upon Sebesta’s research to highlight Dallas streets named after, among others, Confederate Brigadier Generals Richard Montgomery Gano and William Lewis Cabell, the latter also serving three terms as Mayor of Dallas between 1874 and 1885, and Confederate Captain William H. Lemmon. The resulting map is being used by Dallas-area activists to provoke debate and identify further traces of the Confederacy on Dallas’s urban landscape.