Some of the most important Army bases in the U.S. — including forts Hood, Bragg, Benning, Gordon and Polk — are named for Confederate officers, nearly all slaveholders and one generally acknowledged to have been a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
Gov. Bill Walker plans to change the name of an Alaska census district named for confederate military leader Wade Hampton.
Spokeswoman Katie Marquette said Thursday that Alaska place names should reflect and respect the diversity of this state. Walker will look into the process for changing the name in the next few weeks, she said.
Hampton was a one-time slave owner who rose to a lieutenant general fighting for the Confederacy during the Civil War. He became a governor of South Carolina and U.S. senator from that state. His name was first attached to a district in Alaska at the suggestion of his son-in-law, from Virginia, who had been assigned to Nome as a judge in 1913, according to census information cited by U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.
Murkowski urged a name change in a letter to Walker on Tuesday. She said she first learned of local concerns with using the name for a western Alaska census area several months ago. Last week, the city and Native village of Hooper Bay submitted a resolution suggesting the census district be named “Kusilvak,” she wrote. The area is home to the Kusilvak Mountains.
“If ever there was a right time to erase the accident of history which named ‘the statistical equivalent of a county’ for one with no direct Alaska connection it is now,” she wrote.
See Full Story at Stars and Stripes
