Florida Town Renames ‘Old Dixie Highway’ for Barack Obama

As a strike against its “racist” past, a city in Florida has renamed a stretch of Old Dixie Highway for Barack Obama.

Officials in Riviera Beach, Florida told the media that the move was made to eliminate the homage to slavery represented by the decades old street name.

City Mayor Thomas Masters told WPTV news that the former name of the roadway was “symbolic of racism, symbolic of the Klan, symbolic of cross burnings, and today we are stepping up to a new day, a new era.”

One local citizen even claimed that she had witnessed a “cross burning” on the street decades ago.

Mayor Masters insisted that the intersection where the new “President Barack Obama” highway sign was going up is the only one of its kind because it is “where Doctor Martin Luther King Junior and his son, President Barack Obama will shake hands together.”

But Riviera Beach isn’t the only Florida city to make such a move. In 2013 the city of Pahokee in western Palm Beach County also renamed a street after the sitting president.

Florida cities aren’t alone in considering new actions to further erase their past history. In a lopsided vote, the city council in New Orleans, Louisiana, recently voted to remove all the Confederate statues in the city.

The cost of removing the Confederate monuments is estimated to cost $144,000, all of which is supposed to be paid by an “anonymous donor.”

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com