For more than a century, Negrohead Mountain has towered over the countryside north of Malibu, offering unrivalled views of the Pacific to generations of hikers. But this week, at the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen, the striking landmark’s time-honoured name disappeared from local maps.
The 2,031ft summit will henceforth be known as Ballard Mountain, a name deemed to be more in keeping with the modern era. The new title honours a blacksmith and former slave called John Ballard, who was among the first men to settle in its foothills in 1880, after fleeing Los Angeles to escape persecution by segregationist police officers.
A hundred people attended the renaming ceremony for the peak, including Ballard’s great-grandson Reggie, a retired fireman, who told reporters that the US Geological Survey’s decision to approve the altered name “means a lot to me”, adding: “It’s not often you get the chance to right a historical wrong.”
But while few at the event begrudged well-meaning locals the chance to remove a racial slur from their footpath signs, the move wasn’t universally well received. Behind the scenes, the renaming of Negrohead Mountain marked the latest step in a controversial trend. After years of blithely ignoring the often unfortunate derivation of many of the nation’s place names, America is slowly rebranding its landmarks. And historians fear that the push to replace colourful words or phrases with “acceptable” alternatives is seeing the nation’s heritage sacrificed at the altar of political correctness.
Source/Full Story: The Independent