Chapel Hillians will likely notice a change on one of the town’s major thoroughfares this week.
Town manager Roger Stancil wrote in an e-mail to the Town Council that post-mounted and overhead streets signs along Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard would be changed throughout this week.
The new signs will no longer have “Historic Airport Road” listed on the bottom portion of the street sign. The change was approved at last week’s meeting of the Chapel Hill Town Council.
“I want to make sure that we understand the importance of what’s happening here. There was a large discussion that included many, many citizens,” said councilmember Donna Bell, who served on the committee – called Justice in Action – that helped bring about the name change.
Bell emphasized that, even though the road name is being changed, the work is not yet over for the Justice in Action committee.
“We still have a committee that is part of our town structure to keep us on track, thinking about issues of social equity and racial issues in town.”
The name change to Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard is just one of the things that the Chapel Hill/Carrboro chapter of the NAACP originally requested back in 2003.
Councilmember Nancy Oates said that she wanted residents to know this is more than a symbolic effort.
“I wanted to make sure that the community understood that, just because we are renaming the street, it is not something that we are checking off a box and saying, ‘Okay, now we’re done with our racial equity.”
Some of the other things that the NAACP has requested include a Civil—Rights—oriented reading room in the Chapel Hill Public Library and a citywide discussion about how Chapel Hill can promote racial equity.
