What's in a street name?

An outrage or a trivial pursuit?

The Washington Post ran a story this week about the recurring effort to rename streets with Confederate names in Alexandria. As the story notes:

Alexandria lawmakers launched a pilot program in 2021 that made it easier to rename those streets by petition. It required 25 percent of property owners on a given street to support the change before it would be taken to City Hall for a vote.

But that didn’t necessarily mean it was achievable, especially in an area that occasionally flew the Confederate flag as recently as 2015.

Note the suggestion that racism is the reason the city has not changed street names. You’d never guess that 80 percent of ALX voters supported Joe Biden in 2020.

I have another take: Nobody cares. Nobody cares because many of the names of the streets don’t really shout out “The Lost Cause.”

The Jefferson Davis Highway was inextricably linked to the Confederate president. Good riddance to an offensive name. Thank you, state lawmakers for changing the name to Richmond Highway.

Lee Street is the street most often selected as the name most due for a facelift.

Thing is, Lee Street was named not for Robert E. Lee, who grew up in Alexandria, but for Lee’s family, which included many notables, including “Light Horse Harry” Lee, who fought with George Washington. So it is not a cute-and-dry Civil War homage.

There are 40 other Alexandria streets named for lesser known military men and targeted by an area resident who wants to change 41 street names —although the origins of their names don’t exactly shout “Stars and Bars.”

Last fall, the Alexandria Times reported on Forrest Street, named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and First Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

A street named after a KKK grand wizard? Yes, that is cringe-worthy . If the folks who live on Forrest Street know about the street name’s origin and want to change it, City Hall, I am sure, can accommodate them.

What bothers me the most about this initiative is that it is not organic.

Alex Sprague, who is pushing for the street name changes, hasn’t been able to produce the needed signatures to launch a name change, even though he has been trying for six years and Alexandria lowered the threshold of signatures in support of the change from 75 percent of residents on a given street to 25 percent.

Sprague’s Reconstruction Alexandria Twitter account has 48 followers and 66 Facebook friends.

“The city is not in the business of changing street names. We’re letting it be a citizen-led initiative,” Alexandria City Planner Tony LaColla told the Washington Post in 2021. See, if it were citizen-led, Alexandria wouldn’t have to change the rules.

I should note that Alexandria’s Confederate street names do not date back to the Civil War. They go back to the 50s and are a vestige of Jim Crow. So, no pride there.

That said, changing the names of streets presents unwanted expenses and inconvenience for locals, who would have to change their addresses for billing purposes, as well as get new stationary, business cards and more. So there should be a strong reason for a name makeover.

Alexandria is special because of its history — and how we view history changes. This, however, is a trivial pursuit.

Debra J. Saunders is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership. Contact her at dsaunders@discovery.org.