Florida city renames street after Barack Obama in Stalinist effort to purge cultural heritage while praising the Great Leader

Saturday, January 09, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: Barack Obama Highway, Florida, Stalinist purge

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(NaturalNews) The lionization of Barack Obama has begun already, and the man still has a year left in his presidency. Oh, and the lionization is coming at the expense of southern culture, which is appropriate, of course, if you're a Left-wing hater who takes great pride in memory-holing ideas, concepts and societal norms with which you disagree.

As reported by the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the nearby city of Riviera Beach renamed a local thoroughfare, Old Dixie Highway, in honor of the 44th president in recent days. Now, to the delight of city officials at least, it is known as Barack Obama Highway.

The change, say city officials, "will help move the community past its segregated history," the paper reported. Um, more on that in a moment. In fact, more on a lot of things in a moment.

The change marks the second time uber-liberal Palm Beach County changed the name of a road to Barack Obama something. A couple of years ago – with Obama barely into his second term – officials in Pahokee, Fla., apparently couldn't wait anymore, so they renamed East First Street (nothing racist about that, right?) to Barack Obama Boulevard.

Dixie isn't racist – unless you want it to be

The Sun Sentinel further noted:

"A crowd cheered as a crew lowered the Old Dixie Highway street sign in Riviera Beach and raised one bearing the sitting president's name: President Barack Obama Highway."

[Seriously, have you ever attended an "official highway renaming ceremony" before? Or do you have a life?]

"We are stepping up to a new day, a new era, and replacing Old Dixie with Barack Obama, who represents change," Riviera Beach Mayor Thomas Masters told Sun Sentinel news partner WPEC-Ch. 12.

The city council voted last August for the name change inside the city limits. Now, the first intersection of roads are named after Obama and another favorite name from the civil rights holdovers, Martin Luther King Jr.

Some who came to speak at the August city council meeting just didn't think the name "Old Dixie" put the Florida community in a good (meaning politically correct) light.

"The name Old Dixie does not align in any way with the goal of racial and social equality," Kendra Williams, a Riviera Beach resident, said during the meeting, the Sentinel reported. "Let's just move forward and move on, because it's time."

In 1998, the Florida Legislature designated the Florida Turnpike the Ronald Reagan Turnpike, but that was a decade after Reagan left office.

Now, the impetus for this change – that "Old Dixie" is somehow racist, because that's what this is about – is just ludicrous, plain and simple.

Dixie and, in particular, Old Dixie, is not about race – or racism – it's about heritage. It's about culture. It's a concept, a lifestyle, not a political ideology or movement. And the fact that all things "Southern" have been hijacked by Left-wing kooks seeking to rewrite history does not change any of this.

What's even more interesting – and ironic – is that the name Dixie, and the "Old South" it came to represent, was partially devised in the North.

Dixie is cultural

According to A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles (1951), by Mitford M. Mathews:

-- The term Dixieland, for example, had twin origins. First, private money issued locally at a New Orleans bank in the French Quarter (Citizens State Bank) in $10 notes was called "dix," the French word for "ten," which was printed on one side. The note became known as "Dixies" by English-speaking Southerners, and the area surrounding New Orleans, as well as the French-speaking portions of Louisiana, became known as "Dixieland."

-- In addition, the word also preserves the name of a "Mr. Dixy," who owned slaves on Manhattan Island, where slavery was legal until 1827. He was such a kind master that "Dixy's Land" became renowned throughout the North as a bastion full of material comforts.

-- It could also have been derived from a man named Jeremiah Dixon, who surveyed the Mason-Dixon line, which established the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania, and, for the most part, between free states and slave states – though Delaware, a Union border state that remained slave-holding until the ratification of the 13th Amendment, was south of the Mason-Dixon line.

The South still contains many references to, and vestiges of, the Antebellum Era, with which the "Dixieland" moniker is mostly associated. That's not "racist," that's just a cultural segment of our country, much like the Northeast, Midwest, West and Southwest all have different cultural flavors.

Sources:

Sun-Sentinel.com

UNC.edu

LouisDl.LouisLibraries.org