Robert Moses State Park, as it is now called, is a beautiful piece of land located on New York's Fire Island, to the south of Long Island. The Park is beautiful; it preserves the pristine nature of the area, which includes nearly 5 miles of shoreline complete with four different lifeguard-staffed fields each equipped with concessions and other amenities. To the east, the famous Fire Island Light House is accessible via the nature trail beginning at the Park's Field 5. The communities of Fire Island, too, are accessibly via the nature trail or by walking along the shoreline where Fire Island and the Atlantic Ocean meet. Robert Moses State Park attracts nearly 3.8 million visitors annually and it is not at all difficult to see why.

Yet, Robert Moses State Park is named for a racist and segregationist. This is not acceptable.

Robert Moses served as a public official involved in public works and urban development in New York City and the surrounding area, including Long Island's Nassau and Suffolk Counties. While Moses held twelve different titles throughout his long career, sometimes holding several simultaneously, it is important to note that Moses was never elected to office. Moses actually once did run for elected office—for Governor—in the gubernatorial election of 1934; he ran as a Republican and lost in a landslide to Democratic candidate Herbert H. Lehman. Lehman won 58.01% of the vote compared to Moses' 36.72%.

Still, despite never being being elected to office and being vastly unpopular when he ran, Moses wielded substantial power in the development of the greater New York metropolitan area. Moses used this power to spearhead and oversee the construction of many great projects, including numerous bridges, tunnels, highways, and more, that greatly improved New York's infrastructure and are still in use today. However, there was a darker side to Moses' projects: segregation.

While clearing the way for his projects, Moses displaced many poor and minority communities who lived in his path and, while building, Moses specifically went to great lengths to keep these same people out of the communities and areas he was developing. The unfortunate result was that much of New York, specifically Long Island, became more segregated after Moses' influence than it had been before.

It has been claimed that Moses even purposely constructed low bridges on Long Island's Southern State Parkway to prevent the poor, specifically the non-white, from accessing Moses' beloved Jones Beach, located directly to the west of the State Park that now bears his name. Although the veracity of this claim has been doubted, Moses' other better documented actions, such as his removal of some 7,000 Black and Latino residents of a community near Central Park to construct Lincoln Center and his removal of anti-discrimination language in a city contract to ensure that Black veterans could not move into Manhattan's Stuyvesant Town, make it all the more believable.

Ultimately, though Robert Moses can be credited with the construction of the causeway and bridges that connect Fire Island and Jones Beach Island to mainland Long Island, his efforts to keep both islands essentially segregated for whites only greatly undermines the positive aspects of that work and certainly forfeits his right to have a State Park on Fire Island named for him. Fortunately, the Park was not always named for Moses.

In 1908 Long Island's first State Park was created. That Park was known as Fire Island State Park and was known by that name until 1964 when Robert Moses finished the causeway. That year, Fire Island State Park was rechristened in Moses' honor. 

However, if a name can be changed it can be changed back and that is precisely what New York State should do now. Non-white people should not have to attend a State Park—that they have every right to attend—named for a man who did everything in his power to prevent them from ever being there.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, and the unjust murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and far to many Black people in the past year alone, and the subsequent protests that occurred and are still occuring in every major city and every state in the US, as well as in at least 18 other countries, the United States must recognize that the issue of racism has never been adequately addressed and has not been resolved.

The very least the US federal government, state governments, and local governments can do is remove monuments dedicated to racists from public spaces and rename public spaces that are, themselves, dedicated to racists. Robert Moses State Park is one such public space.

Currently, Long Island ranks as the 10th-most segregated region of the US and, although this is not entirely due to Moses alone, Moses is partially responsible for this sad fact. If bridges and tunnels are to be a part of Moses' legacy, then segregation and racism must be too. Recognizing Moses' true legacy, and Long Island's history of racism that continues to this very day, is the least that Long Islanders can do.

The New York State government must rename Robert Moses State Park. A far more appropriate name is what the Park was originally called in 1908; Fire Island State Park.