Well, here’s an idea. State Rep. Carl Sherman, who represents District 109 (DeSoto, Cedar Hill, Glenn Heights, Hutchins, Lancaster, Wilmer, parts of Ovilla, Ferris, Seagoville, and Dallas) issued a release today saying that he supports renaming the street on which the Dallas Police Department has its headquarters. The Dallas Observer wrote about this effort a few days ago. I won’t link to their site because all the pop-up ads and tracking software make my computer overheat (not exaggerating). But here’s a 2015 Texas Monthly story explaining why it was a bad idea to name a street after Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar. As in:
Texas’s bombastic and grandiose second president is now the namesake of a university and at least a dozen lesser Texas schools, a principal Austin thoroughfare, and a Northeast Texas county. Nobody is clamoring to change any of those names, despite the fact that he was a slaveholder, a fire-eating states rights advocate and an ardent practitioner of ethnic cleansing.
Whether you judge it through hindsight or by the standards of his own times, Lamar’s Texas presidency was a miserable failure, much of it thanks to Lamar’s extreme racism and ethnocentrism.
So what about Botham Jean, the man who, by all accounts, was a great guy and was murdered by an off-duty cop while he was eating ice cream in his own apartment right across the street from police headquarters? What say you?
