Why Street Names Teach Children Who Counts as American

What children read on the curb becomes the civics they carry.

Photo by Ian Noble on Unsplash

It’s easy to pretend maps are neutral. They aren’t. Every morning, children walk past names chosen by adults — some long gone, some elected recently — and those choices tell them who belongs at the center of the story.

The old honor system is still visible. Even after removals, according to the as of more than 2,000 Confederate symbols still remain in public view…monuments, schools, buildings, and the signs that carry children to class. That figure comes from a decade of tracking in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Whose Heritage? database, a ledger that shows how much of the nineteenth century still sits on 21st century corners.

Some of those corners are famous. Some are ordinary. A stretch of U.S. 80 in Alabama is still referred to in official records as Jefferson Davis Highway, a name that survived the transition from named trails to numbered routes and lingers in state and federal road histories. A child riding a bus between Tuskegee and Selma sees that label without needing a textbook to decode what it honors.

In Charleston, the bronze likeness of John C. Calhoun is gone from its column, but the street that bears his name remains. Local officials have pointed to state…