LA Street, School Names Next To Go In Purge Of Confederate-Era Sites?
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com/AP) — Now that a monument honoring Confederate soldiers at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery has been removed, will other similar locations soon follow suit?
The 6-foot stone marker stood since 1925 in a section of the famous Los Angeles graveyard where more than 30 Confederate veterans and their families are buried.
It was loaded into a pickup truck Tuesday morning and taken to a storage site after Hollywood Forever president Tyler Cassity said the cemetery received a torrent of calls and emails requesting the monument's removal.
The move comes days after violence erupted at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the city's ordered removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
The events triggered a national debate about the future of similar monuments, including several located in Southern California.
And while removing the monument at Hollywood Forever Cemetery is now a reality, it's still unclear whether similar efforts for other Confederate-affiliated locations in the Southland will take shape.
Johnston Street, located in Lincoln Heights, was named after Hancock Johnston, the second son of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, a Confederate general during the Civil War.
Although renaming streets is not extremely difficult for the Los Angeles City Council, renaming U.S. highways is an entirely different matter.
One of five remaining markers of the Jefferson Davis Highway - named in honor of the former U.S. Senator and first President of the Confederate States - is located in Bakersfield and describes Davis as the "Father of National Highways".
The highway, which was conceived in 1913 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, also has markers in San Diego and three other California locations.
In addition to monuments and roads, two elementary schools named after Robert E. Lee have been targeted for name changes. Long Beach school officials held a 2015 meeting to explore the possibility of renaming Robert E. Lee Elementary School on Temple Avenue, but no decision was reached.
Other Confederate-linked sites in California include Fort Bragg in Mendocino County, which was established in 1889 and named after Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg; and Confederate Corners in Monterey County, named after Southerners who settled there in the late 1860s.
(© Copyright 2017 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. City News Service contributed to this report.)
