To the Plan Commission and City Council of Bloomington, Indiana:

Wipe hate off our map. Rename Dixie Street.

We the undersigned request that Bloomington’s Dixie Street be renamed. To fail to do so—to continue to bestow official honor on a term of endearment for the Confederate South—would run counter to the spirit of City Council Resolution 20-06 “Denouncing and condemning white nationalism and white supremacy,” passed on May 5, 2020 with a unanimous vote. It would also disappoint the call to action in Mayor Hamilton and City Clerk Bolden’s statement of July 7, 2020, in which we are urged to “…do everything we can to forge inclusion and equity in Bloomington...”

Consciously or not, ‘Dixie’ romanticizes slavery.

Our understanding is that Dixie Street is so named due to proximity to the Dixie Highway; that the Dixies in Bloomington’s “Dixie Street,” “the Dixie flag” (a term for the Confederate flag), and “Dixieland” (the blackface minstrel song) share the same referent.

In Indiana, the word ‘Dixie,’ states Indiana University’s Dr. Cara Caddoo, among whose specialties are African-American history and matters of race, “was popularized in the 1860s . . . after the debut of the blackface minstrel song ‘Dixie Land’.” “After the Civil War, the word evoked racist, romanticized images of the Old South as a place where enslaved Black people labored happily in cotton fields, and white Americans lived in Gone with the Wind-style plantations” (e-mail to author, July 16, 2020).

And of the Dixie Highway, and Bloomington’s Dixie Street, Indiana University’s Dr. Eric Sandweiss, Carmony Chair of History and editor of the Indiana Magazine of History, notes that “by the time that the highway was developed (and I assume that this is also roughly the time in which the land including Dixie St. was subdivided here in Bloomington), the association of ‘Dixie’ and ‘Dixieland’ was, to white Americans, largely a nostalgic and romanticized one—which means, of course, that they willfully submerged the connection with slavery, failed reconstruction, and ongoing Jim Crow laws. That doesn’t mean that the people who deeded to the public the right of way named Dixie Street had those associations consciously in mind (again, connecting people’s minds to the road itself—and to the commercial success that it promised--was likely their more immediate and conscious intent). But it played out in the background, as it continues to do, today” (e-mail to author, July 9, 2020).

It's time to stand up for what’s right.

Bloomington would not be the first to purge terms that signal fondness for the antebellum South. The band The Dixie Chicks is now The Chicks, and the band Lady Antebellum is now Lady A. Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede, a Civil-War-themed dinner theater attraction whose website promises “friendly competition, beautiful horses, trick riding, romance, music and laughter” (dpstampede.com, July 14, 2020) became “Dolly Parton’s Stampede” at the beginning of the 2018 season. Even a company offering entertainment that skirts the issue of slavery and encourages spectators to see the Civil War’s North versus South as a friendly competition can acknowledge the problematic nature of the term.

Bloomington would also not be the first to undertake the logistical process of renaming a Dixie street; Florida’s Miami-Dade County earlier this year voted to rename Dixie Highway, choosing to honor Harriet Tubman instead, and officials from the county are now pushing for Dixie Highway to be renamed state-wide. And at the national level, the Senate Armed Services Committee is calling for the removal from U.S. military property of imagery and names that honor the Confederacy.

We hope you agree that affectionate references to institutions that depended on and fought to maintain slavery do not belong on a map of our town.

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