Are two Oakhurst road names racially offensive? Yes, so Madera County should change them

The movement to reconsider place names that might be racially offensive has come to Oakhurst, specifically some roads near Yosemite High School.

A change.org petition drive is asking Madera County officials to rename the roads in an effort to make Oakhurst more welcoming to all people.

It is not hard to see how roads named Hangtree Lane and Spook Lane could offend Black people and others with their racially charged words. In light of the death of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis who died while in the custody of four police officers, a new movement has sprung up to respect the Black community and remove racism from American culture.

Not surprisingly, however, is a counter petition drive calling on Madera County officials to support the roadway names as part of the history of Oakhurst.

That point of view might have merit if the street names were deeply woven into Madera County history. However, the roadways got those names in the late 1970s and early 1980s, making them still newcomers on the county’s historic scale.

Innocent beginnings

The term “hang tree” was intended by Stanley Hiten to refer to the large oak tree that hung over Road 426.

Hiten was a landowner with sizable holdings in that area, and he suggested that county officials allow the naming of Hangtree Lane. A devoted Seventh-Day Adventist who died in 2000, Hiten would be aghast today to realize that some people would take the name to mean a place where Black people were lynched. His daughters told Bee staff writer Carmen George of their father: “There was not a racist bone in his body.”

George reported that Spook Lane, meanwhile, was the brainchild of Earl and Ethel Forbes, who told the county planning department in 1979 that the road had been informally called Spook Lane since 1962 “when we decorated it for Halloween.”

Racist meanings

There are problems with the words “hang tree” and “spook.” In the case of the former, trees were used by Southern plantation owners to hang Black slaves that had been either caught fleeing or found guilty of some other charge, often trumped up.

“Spook” became an epithet to mean a Black person after World War II, then had a resurgence in the 1970s.

Why use either when other words can be substituted and no offense given to anyone, argues Stephanie Bebee, a Coarsegold resident who created the change.org petition to change the names of Hangtree and Spook lanes.

“Whatever ‘historical origins’ the names Spook Lane and Hangtree Lane have are irrelevant,” the petition reads. “The images and feelings that they evoke have no place in any present day town.”

As of midafternoon Tuesday, 1,992 people had signed the petition “so that Oakhurst can be a better and more welcoming place for all.”

Opposing that is the online petition by Michaela Pemelton to keep the names for their historic value in Oakhurst. That petition had nearly 2,400 signatures by midafternoon Tuesday.

Pemelton opposes the Bebee petition drive as “cancel culture” that seeks to do away with any history that offends.

Not critical history

Assuming Hangtree and Spook lanes really do have historic value to residents in Oakhurst — a dubious proposition since the roads are not major thoroughfares — that importance would indeed be just for locals. But the potential racial offense would exist for any visitor who happened across their names.

Since Oakhurst is a tourist-serving community, its economy depends on the good will it shows “outsiders.” Thus, their opinion matters, and it is a safe bet that any person of color visiting the town will be offended by street signs declaring Hangtree and Spook.

Second, human history is always evolving. If it were not so, Hangtree and Spook would never have been named as they were. California was once the province of the Spanish and Mexican governments. To be historically accurate, streets throughout the state should have kept Spanish names. But they didn’t, for obvious reasons.

Madera County supervisors have a chance, at this time of reawakening of racial awareness in America, to make things better in a corner of Oakhurst. The county has mailed alternate name suggestions to residents on the roads. Alternatives for Hangtree include “Picnic Tree Lane” (likely stemming from stories from old residents about picnicking under the tree) and “Badger Country Lane,” after Yosemite High’s mascot.

Alternatives for Spook Lane include “Forest Park Drive” and “Spirit Lane.”

One note: The county needs to do further research on the option of Picnic Tree Lane. The Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University in Michigan says lynchings frequently took place at picnic-like settings. For some older Blacks, the word “picnic” thus has a horrible connotation.

Whatever new names are ultimately chosen will be an improvement to the current ones, which are very clearly racist in today’s America.

“It’s a small puzzle piece to a more inclusive Oakhurst,” says Beebe. She is right, and the supervisors should make the road re-namings a priority.

This story was originally published July 15, 2020 at 10:13 AM.