Why some Floridians want to rename Broward County, Plantation and Lee County
Around the state and country and in South Florida, people are grappling with names, statues and monuments that memorialize a legacy of systemic racism and deciding whether they should remove those symbols from the public eye for good.
In Duval County, the school board unanimously approved a motion to consider renaming six public schools named after Confederate generals, reported the Florida Times-Union. Similarly, the Alachua County School Board voted to rename the elementary school commemorating Confederate general J.J. Finley, reported the Gainesville Sun. In Tampa, a petition with over 130,000 signatures calls for the permanent removal of the world’s second largest Confederate flag flying over the Tampa intersection of Interstate-75 and Interstate-4.
In Miami, protesters vandalized the Bayside Marketplace statue of Christopher Columbus, who is perceived by some as a symbol of violent colonization. And across South Florida, individual activists are looking to stop honoring names they condemn as racist relics of another era: Broward County, the city of Plantation and Lee County.
Some opponents say to change the name is to change history. But history can and will continue to live on through books without being on names and statues, said Daniel Royles, a Florida International University history professor whose research is in African-American AIDS activism. Commemorating figures who fought to preserve slavery and segregation demonstrates to Black communities that these people are still actively honored, he added.
“It sends a powerful message about whose history matters and who truly belongs in the United States of America,” Royles said.
And to those who say renaming would erase history, he asked: “What would happen if we put up a statue of Castro in Miami?”
Changes have been made before in South Florida. In February, Miami-Dade commissioners unanimously approved renaming portions of Dixie Highway under county jurisdiction as Harriet Tubman Highway. Dixie was a name for the southern U.S. states that were part of the Confederacy. A similar movement caught traction over Hallandale Beach’s portions of the highway. But no action has been taken. In Riviera Beach, a portion of Dixie Highway was renamed President Barack Obama Highway.
In Broward County, three streets in Hollywood named after Confederate and Ku Klux Klan figures were renamed in 2017 to Freedom, Hope and Liberty.
Beyond schools and roads, people are proposing to change the names of Broward County, Lee County and the city of Plantation.
Broward County
Although a Tampa resident, Kyle Hill, 33, wants to see the name of Broward County forever changed. He put a petition on change.org on June 7 to see that happen.
Hill’s petition was partially inspired by nationwide protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death, among other unarmed Black people recently killed during encounters with the police. Floyd, who died after a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, has inspired mostly peaceful protests across the country, including several Black Lives Matter protests in South Florida.
“We’ve seen this big wave of support for this kind of movement against racism, and not only throughout the country but throughout the world,” Hill said.
The petition, which has garnered over 2,000 signatures, takes issue with the county’s namesake, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, who served as the 19th governor of Florida. The petition states he was also a “racist, segregationist and an arms smuggler.”
A statue of Broward was removed from the county’s courthouse after a lawyers group raised concerns that he was racist. One of the lawyers, Bill Gelin, told the Miami Herald Broward “was not a good guy when it comes to the equality of all men and women.”
“There’s just not a lot of awareness of who Broward was or what he stood for,” said Hill, who lived near Broward before moving to Tampa. “I think if most of the people in the county knew who he was or what he stood for they would agree with me and feel it’s no longer appropriate for the county to have that name.”
Hill added he knows some people may be tired of hearing about race. But he’s not done talking about it.
“I really want to see Florida be a place where there’s zero tolerance policy in terms of racism,” Hill said, “and I don’t think it’ll be enough until we get to that point.”
Lewis Talmadge, 55, said he understands why the name is offensive to some, but the underlying issues causing racism will not be addressed by changing the name of the county he’s lived in for 50 years.
Talmadge, an operations and project manager who lives in Sunrise, said organizations and companies have a responsibility to address racism within their institutions and other concerted efforts should be in that vein rather than renaming.
“We need to focus our efforts, including financial, in more important things to see change,” he said.
Broward County Mayor Dale Holness said he sympathizes with the petition and also doesn’t like the history Broward conjures. But he said ensuring a name change isn’t a priority right now.
“When you have some place where you live named after someone who history tells us is a racist, then there’s some concern for folks who might feel the pain or the trauma of those people who existed back then,” Holness said. “[But] the priority for me is how do we ensure prosperity for all the people of Broward County.”
Holness, who said additional eyes may be on him during this time as a Black mayor, said he wants to focus on solutions to problems stemming from systemic racism, including reducing interactions between the Black community and police officers.
One name change being floated for Broward County is Fort Lauderdale County. Holness said that adjustment would capitalize on the name recognition of Fort Lauderdale, similar to the way Miami-Dade County changed its name from Dade County to incorporate Miami’s recognizability.
But there may be a problem with that name, too. The city of Fort Lauderdale was named after Maj. William Lauderdale, who fought alongside Andrew Jackson against the Florida Seminole Tribe in the early 1800s.
Holness said it’s a “very bad connection” and will be taken into consideration if the county ever gets renamed.
The Seminole Tribe of Florida was not available for comment before publication of this article.
Broward County was unable to provide an answer on how the renaming process would work.
Plantation
In the city of Plantation, a renaming petition sponsored by a longtime resident has inspired turmoil online.
Plantation resident Dharyl Auguste, 27, started the petition on change.org on June 7, inspired by the recent toppling and removal of Confederate statues and other monuments associated with racism nationwide.
“We’re really going through a time right now where it seems we’re going to stand up and really strike at figures that shouldn’t be memorialized,” Auguste said. His petition has gathered almost 7,500 signatures in just over a week.
The renaming of Plantation targets the meaning of the name itself rather than a particular historical figure. Some opposed to the renaming have argued the literal definition of the word plantation makes no explicit reference to slavery, but Auguste said it’s about connotation.
“It does automatically bring us to slavery,” Auguste said. “You know, having people enslaved and working in these plantations — it just kind of being a purgatory.”
Auguste grew up in and loves Plantation but is embarrassed by its name, which he said constantly takes city outsiders aback.
“This place is so beautiful and I wish it had a name to represent that,” said Auguste, who prefers the name Jacaranda, “because the name Plantation just doesn’t really serve us anymore.”
During a Plantation City Council meeting on June 10, Council member Denise Horland — the only member to directly address Auguste’s comments — said she was “horrified and disappointed” by some responses to the petition.
“I’ve seen so many wonderful acts of love and neighborliness in the last three months,” Horland said. “So I was really disappointed at the profanity and the way that people were treated when they were expressing their opinion.”
Jaime Alvarado, 28, a local business owner, created a post in the Facebook group Plantation Nation, advertising Auguste’s petition. He said the post drew “over 1,000 xenophobic [and] racial slurs” in just a few hours. The post has since been taken down, Alvarado said.
Comments captured in screenshots provided by Alvarado say Alvarado and others defending the petition should “go back [to] where you came from.” Alvarado said he immigrated from Ecuador in 2002 and has lived in Plantation since.
A name change would take at least two years once supporters file an official petition with the city, said Plantation Mayor Lynn Stoner, and wouldn’t go on a ballot before 2022.
Lee County
A petition to rename Lee County created by Gabriel Boorse, also on change.org, has been signed by nearly 4,000 people. The county is named after Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate army during the Civil War.
Boorse, 22, said he and his wife wanted to do something that would have a local impact as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. Having family of mixed race, Boorse said names like Lee County perpetuate the struggles that Black Americans face.
“The idea is what we’re removing is a symbol of oppression that was established long after the Civil War in order to honor history that we actually care about,” he said.
His suggestion is to rename the county Calusa County, honoring the indigenous tribe that lived in Southwest Florida.
Boorse, who is a software engineer, said the backlash his petition has received is from people arguing that he is trying to erase history. To that, Boorse said that Lee never lived in the Southwest Florida area. The Tampa Bay Times reported in 2016 that he had “no real ties to Florida.”
“There’s no history in the first place,” he said. “They’re symbols of oppression. Not symbols of history.”
All four county commissioners declined to comment.
Commissioner Frank Mann told NBC2 on June 12 that the state could afford these conversations and Calusa County was a good new name to consider.
Estero Rep. Ray Rodrigues said Lee County is a chartered county, and renaming the county would be via an amendment to the charter, which would require approval by county voters, as well as the Legislature and the governor.
Lee was also brought up during public comment in a Tuesday County Commission meeting by Keri Hendry. She advocates moving a downtown Fort Myers statue of Lee to a museum and putting a freedom fountain in its place, calling the move “common sense.”
Hendry would like the city to commission a local artist to create the freedom fountain, which would replace a symbol of oppression with one of unity, she said. Hendry is a descendant of a Lee County founding family, and she said she’d like to have progressive change be the legacy of the family name.
“The statue is more accurately a historical artifact, and as a historical artifact, its proper place is in a museum where all the local history can be taught so that future generations can comprehend the mistakes made in the past and thus learn how not to repeat them,” she said.
Chanelle Rose, a professor of modern American history at Rowan University in New Jersey, wrote a book on the history of racism in South Florida and the struggle for Black freedom — a topic she said is deep-rooted in the area’s legacy.
Rose compares the movements to the process of denazification in Germany, when symbols of Nazi ideology were removed from public sight.
This history can’t be erased, she said. But it shouldn’t be honored.
Communities should collectively decide whether to rename a town and what the new name should be, she said, adding that it is hard to find historical figures who were not part of the country’s racist past because that is endemic to American society.
“To this idea that it’s superficial, I would say, on the one hand, I agree,” Rose said. “But then how do you really quantify that? Because if the people who live in that community are offended ... how can you say, ‘Well that’s not something that you should be fighting against?’”