LITTLE ROCK - Seeking to distance itself from a checkered racial past, Little Rock erased "Confederate Blvd." from interstate highway signs just weeks before dignitaries arrived for the opening of Bill Clinton's presidential library.
The Confederate Boulevard signs had been the first landmarks many saw after landing at the city's airport. And while the boulevard still runs north from Interstate 440, signs for Exit 1 now tout a southbound stretch of the same road named "Springer Blvd.," which honors black community leader Horace Springer and his family.
"We did have an incredibly significant event that was occurring here, and that was something that was bothersome," said Mayor Jim Dailey, whose city, until Clinton, was best known for the Central High School desegregation crisis of 1957. "We have a city that is in every way trying to dispel those things that divide us."
He said the national and international visitors coming to the library opening probably moved the city to take more definitive action.
"We continue to try to be sensitive to some of the most egregious parts of our history relative to racism," Dailey said. "Whether issues are dealing with the Confederate flag or the name Confederate Boulevard, it's probably one of those things that needs to be brought to order."
The city had renamed a portion of Confederate Boulevard as Springer Boulevard in 1974, but the state listed only the old name on the four corresponding exit signs when I-440 was opened in 1981. A month before the Clinton dedication, Dailey wrote to the state Highway and Transportation Department asking it to change the signs from "Confederate" to "Springer."
City Manager Bruce Moore said Monday that the initial request came from Stacy Pittman, a vice president of a Little Rock public relations company. Another vice president at the company is Clinton foundation president Skip Rutherford, who said the library and museum complex was not behind the name change.
The signs were switched Nov. 4, two weeks before the dedication. Clinton made racial reconciliation a theme of his presidency and continues to promote the cause.
Randy Ort, a highway department spokesman, said the agency has received a number of complaints about dropping its former reference to the boulevard, which runs past national and Confederate cemeteries. One complaint came from the Arkansas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
"This road-street-blvd was named to honor all Confederates that fought (Mexican, African-American, Jewish, etc. - all ethnic groups fought for the South during the War of Northern Aggression!)," wrote Danny Honnoll of Jonesboro.
In an interview Monday, Honnoll said that while the city has honored the Springers and Clinton, it was doing a dishonor to thousands of men and women of all colors who died during the war. "We're not just honoring white Confederates," Honnoll said.
Lottie Shackelford, who lived near Springer at the time and later became the city's first black mayor, said anti-Confederate sentiment had nothing to do with renaming a portion of the roadway three decades ago.
"I'm not even sure there was a great association of Confederate Boulevard with racism. I mean, it didn't have the same connotation as the Confederate flag has now," she said. "The community was just trying to honor a family."
In addition to changing a portion of Confederate Boulevard to Springer Boulevard, Little Rock in recent years has named thoroughfares for Martin Luther King Jr. and Daisy Gatson Bates. Bates served as a mentor for the Little Rock Nine, the first black students to attend Central High School after President Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne to Arkansas to enforce a federal integration order.
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