A county weighed renaming Negro Creek. Black leaders fought the change.

Kansas county votes to keep Negro Creek name despite backlash - The Washington Post

In the summer of 2020, Becky Fast started receiving calls about the six-mile-long creek that winds through parks and neighborhoods in Johnson County, Kan.

The creek became the center of a years-long process dedicated to learning more about its history and deciding whether to rename it, led by Fast, community leaders and officials from the two cities it runs through. While historians were unable to definitively pin down the name’s origin, a story about an enslaved man who escaped from captivity and — when tracked down at the creek by enslavers — killed himself rather than being re-enslaved, became folklore in the area.

Late last month, the committee created to oversee the process, which included several Black leaders in the community, voted unanimously to keep the Negro Creek name. Jay Holbert, president of the NAACP branch in Johnson County, who served on the committee, said he and the other members agreed that changing the name would mean losing the history of enslavement in the area along with it.

“We wanted to keep that known to the public,” Holbert told The Washington Post. “Because when you start erasing history, you start losing a lot of information as to who was what, what was what and why things were going on at that time in our country’s history.”

In the fall of 2020, the committee sought the help of Diane Mutti Burke, a history professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, who — along with one of her graduate students at the time, looked through old maps and online newspaper databases for mentions of Negro Creek.

They completed their first report in February 2021, finding that the first mention of the creek was in an 1879 article in the Western Progress, a Spring Hill, Kan., newspaper.

The article said a Black man had tried to escape slavery before being surrounded at the creek and dying by suicide to avoid capture, according to a report written by Mutti Burke and the graduate student, Deborah Keating.

Another article published in the Johnson County Sun in 1993 stated that there was a local theory that a Black person was “hung near the creek.” It added that older news articles made clear “there was a persistent local legend that linked the creek’s name to an incident of racial violence.” Throughout the United States, there was also a pattern of naming locations with the word “Negro” to mark places where racial violence took place or a Black person died, according to the report.

In some instances, the name of the creek was written with the n-word rather than “Negro.” But in 1963, a federal mandate required geographic locations with the racial slur be changed to “Negro,” Mutti Burke said in an email. She said Negro Creek’s name was officially changed in October 1978, likely as part of a federal renaming project.

The report also stated that the researchers could not substantiate whether the creek was part of the Underground Railroad, which is “notoriously difficult” because it was kept secretive.

During their research, the materials Mutti Burke and Keating could access were limited because libraries and archives were closed during the pandemic, making it a challenge to authenticate any version of the origin story. Early last year, after receiving the first report, committee members asked Mutti Burke to try to authenticate the story again, hoping it would yield the name of the enslaved man at the center of the theories surrounding Negro Creek.

But again, despite accessing physical records, poring over archival material and expanding the databases they searched, Mutti Burke and Keating wrote in a second report, completed in May 2022, that they were “unable to authenticate either the story linking the name of the creek to the death of an enslaved man or his name.”

However, they wrote that the story of the enslaved man seeking freedom “can play a central role in interpretation” because there was “a strong local oral tradition” that it was the origin of Negro Creek’s name.

They added that while the waterway couldn’t formally be represented as a part of the Underground Railroad, it still likely played a role in “enslaved Missourians’ path toward freedom.”

Before voting on whether to keep the name, the committee presented the findings to residents. Not everyone in the community was behind keeping the name.

Holbert said there was an age divide over the renaming. Younger people tended to be in favor of changing the name, thinking Negro Creek was too offensive to remain.

But, Holbert said, keeping the name would help the community understand the history of the area.

“If we don’t keep in mind of the downs and some of the bad things that we went through, you are destined to start repeating it,” he said. “And we don’t want that. We want the younger generation to be aware of, this is what we went through.”

After receiving and reviewing the findings, the Johnson County committee on April 26 voted unanimously to keep the name.

By 2024, Johnson County leaders hope to install plaques near the river to explain the stories surrounding the name it will continue to bear.

“I think it’s going to work out really nice not only for us, but for the community and for the history itself and keeping it in front of people,” Holbert said.