Negrohead.  Negroes Liberty Settlement.  Negro Bend.  Negro Hollow.  Negrohead Bluff.

Those are the current names of geographic locations in the state of Texas, and while Republicans controlling the Texas legislature generally oppose removing statues honoring secessionists and the state’s slave heritage claiming it’s “cancel culture,” they wish to have the names of these locations changed because they contain a term found offensive by most, the Washington Post reports.

The state legislature has taken up a bill requesting that a little known federal agency, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, change the names of more than two dozen locations that contain words such as “negro”–or other more offensive terms for various races–from its registry.  The USBGN is the agency responsible for determining the official names of cities, town, mountains, lakes and other geographic features in the United States.

This is not the first time Texas has made such an attempt.  A 1991 state resolution asked the USBGN to change the names of nineteen locations, but the federal agency chose not to act because, it said, there was no support for such changes locally.

“African Americans should not have to drive anywhere in the country that they helped form and built and have to be insulted with the word ‘Negro,’ ” said Democratic state senator Borris Miles, who wrote the legislation.  “I think it’s a bigger insult that this bill was passed [30] years ago . . . and nothing’s been done about it today. So that’s why we’re back in front and insisting.”

Since then, two locations have been stricken from the federal registry–essentially saying that they are no longer relevant locations, like an abandoned town or a dried up pond–while another, Negro Pond in Montgomery County, was changed to Emancipation Pond in 2018 at the request of local officials.

This bill adds 13 additional locations to the request, bringing to 29 the total number of places Texas state lawmakers wish to have renamed.

While Texas is the only state currently trying to address the issue statewide, it’s far from the only state sprinkled with racist names of towns and features.  According to the Post, a 2015 analysis by the data media company Vocativ found more than 1,400 such sites by cross-referencing registered sites with names in the Racial Slur Database.

“I wouldn’t want one of our great geography teachers to be in a situation like that, to have to explain or try to explain why these places in the great state of Texas are named as such,” said Republican state representative James White, who is Black.