Slate: Racist Place Names Still Prevalent in US

Gringo Gulch, Dago Spring, and Polack Swamp: How many racist place names are there in the United States?
By Brian Palmer|Posted Monday, Oct. 3, 2011

The family of GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry owns a hunting camp in Texas known to many locals as “Niggerhead,” a name that appears on a large rock on the property. Perry claims his father painted over the name as soon as he bought the land, although some in the area dispute the governor’s timeline. Niggerhead was a fairly common place name in the 19th century. How many racially offensive place names are still around?

Hundreds, at least. It’s impossible to say precisely how many offensively named towns and geographic features remain within the nation's borders. State lawmakers don't always agree with the federal government on geographical labels, and people have varying levels of sensitivity. (Is Florida’s Jew Point offensive, for example? What about Indiana’s Redskin Brook?) Government mapmakers have also been working for decades to clean up our toponyms. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names, a branch of the Interior Department, issued two blanket rules decades ago to erase racial slurs from federal maps. In 1962, they replaced “Nigger” with “Negro” in the names of at least 174 places. You can still find such locales as Free Negro Point in Louisiana and Little Negro Creek. (Negro wasn’t widely considered pejorative at the time.) Then they replaced dozens of occurrences of the word “Jap” with “Japanese” in 1974. A handful of state legislatures have also banished select racial slurs from their maps. Still, there are plenty of clearly epithetic names on the books. Consider, for example, Arizona’s Dago Spring and Gringo Gulch, New York’s Polack Swamp, and Chinaman Bayou in Louisiana, to name just a few.

Most offensively named places are in remote areas, like Rick Perry’s hunting camp. (New Mexico’s Kraut Canyon, for example, is in a county with fewer than 10 people per square mile.) If there's one in your area, think of it as an opportunity: State boards of geographic names typically welcome petitions to change controversial map labels, as long as you can suggest a suitable alternative. If you have, say, a relative with a strong connection to the area who has been dead for more than five years, you might get the naming rights.