It started as a joke: now city of Austin's name is racist, on chopping block

Now back to Waterloo, we suppose.

It finally happened. The city of Austin's very name is now racist and is on the chopping block of "Confederate memorials" within the Austin city limits.

What started as a joke has now become a reluctant prophesy. A GoFundMe page and petition to re-name both Austin and Travis County (in memory of homeless icon Leslie Cochran, if that tells you how serious it was) circulated around last year and raised a glorious sum of $25:

https://www.gofundme.com/austin-travis-county-name-change

Tucked into a City of Austin memo released yesterday is a recommendation for the city to explore renaming the very name of the City as one of several memorials to Stephen F. Austin, the father of Texas.
Memo: http://www.austintexas.gov/edims/pio/document.cfm?id=302508 (PDF)

Attempting to tie the opposition to the "slippery slope" fallacy, the memo laid out two tiers of recommendations for study and possible removal:

"Assets for initial review" include ...

• Metz Recreation Center, Park, and Pool
• Jefferson Davis highway marker
• Austin in the Confederacy historical marker
• Fort MacGruder historical marker
• Texas Newspapers in the Confederacy
• Littlefield Street
• Tom Green Street
• Sneed Cove
• Reagan Hill Drive
• Dixie Drive
• Plantation Road
• Confederate Avenue

Robert E. Lee Road and Jeff Davis Avenue were included in strikethrough text.

A second tier of would-be targets in the memo include the following (including changing memorials to Mr. Austin):

• Pease Park
• Bouldin Creek
• Waller Creek
• Barton Springs, Pool, and Bathhouse
• Sons of Confederate Veterans Memorial
• Maj. Buck Walton historical marker
• Johann Jacob Gross historical marker
• Andrew Jackson Hamilton historical marker
• Bouldin Avenue
• Pease Road
• Duval Street
• Burnet Road and Burnet Lane
• Burleson Road
• Lamar Boulevard
• Hancock Drive and Hancock Rec Center
• Stephen F. Austin Drive, as well as the city’s name itself and a rec center named for Austin*
• Waller Street
• William Barton Drive (and all associated "Barton" roadways)
• Oliphant Street
• Lanier Drive
• Mirabeau Street
• Fort Sumter Circle

They missed a few (shhh!). And arguably the Texas Capitol itself is a monument to Confederate soldiers, though the report does not include any state-owned, private, or federally owned markers or tributes. And who knows if ACL fest or Austin City Limits will opt to change their iconic names.

The memo, calling societal values "fluid," complained that many of these memorials were established by a non-democratic process -- e.g. in several cases black residents and women were not allowed to vote for the representatives who appointed the commission members (and hired the bureaucrats) who established these honorifics for Confederate heroes and slave owners. That's a fair point.

The memo paid homage to action taken by the city of New Orleans and Dallas as inspiration for Austin's recent wave of historical redaction (it didn't say anything about the GoFundMe page!). The memo's author suggested replacing names with names that reflect "equity and social justice" (socially fluid terms, we should add).

The memo was put forward to the A̶u̶s̶t̶i̶n̶ City Council by the city's Office of Equity, of which there are at least two taxpayer-funded positions. The amounts of those salaries were not immediately available as the positions were created in September of last year.

The Tracker realizes that there are myriad opinions on the role of the Confederacy's memory among Austin conservatives. We invite any concerned readers to attend the movie screening of "Death of a Nation" in Austin on July 30, (http://www.travisgop.com/dsouza-screening) which explores the traits of today's Democratic Party and its former efforts to preserve slavery and racial disparity, and a chance to meet the film's director at the Travis County Republican Party's Summer Bash on Aug. 25 (http://www.travisgop.com/summerbash). Both events offer a chance to further investigate the issue of the legacy of the South's failed bid for independence.

(In case anyone's wondering, The Travis Tracker editorial staff met this morning and decided against re-naming the The Travis Tracker. Col. Travis was a stand-up dude despite "societally fluid" values that we've all gotten past as an American people since his time on earth.)

__________
Credit: 
Tim Kelly
Todd Jefferies of KLBJ-AM
*Andrew Weber of KUT.org (the full text of the spreadsheet cell was not legible in the PDF version of the city memo).

Image sources:
Wikimedia (Stephen F. Austin memorial at Texas State Cemetery, Austin)