County leaders on Tuesday approved a resolution asking a federal agency to rename Negrohead Mountain near Malibu in honor of a black pioneer who settled in the area in the 19th century.
The peak would be known as Ballard Mountain, after John Ballard, if the U.S. Geological Survey’s Board on Geographic Names grants the request by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors reports the Associated Press in the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Black history is all of our history … and this is an opportunity to celebrate that,” Moorpark College history instructor Patty Colman told supervisors during a board meeting.
The switch would “honor the man, as a man, for the contributions he made,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who made the name-change motion.
The name of the mountain, at 2,031 feet the tallest in the area, originally contained a racial slur that even was found on early government topographic maps. It was changed to “negro” in the 1960s.
Other settlers are believed to have been thinking of Ballard when they named the mountain.
“It really was slander of a courageous and remarkable guy,” said Nicholas Noxon, a local resident who lobbied for the Ballard Mountain name change.
A telephone message from The Associated Press seeking comment from the Board on Geographic Names left after business hours Tuesday was not immediately returned.
According to its Web site, the USGS does not encourage geographic name changes, but among its recognized classes of name changes are “those made to eliminate particular name problems as in cases involving derogatory names.”
The Web site further states: “The Board has a firm policy prohibiting the inclusion of a word in an official geographic name considered by the Board to be derogatory to any racial, ethnic, gender, or religious group.”
After a proposal is received, all interested parties will be asked to comment, the site says. It notes that the process takes about six months.
Yaroslavsky spokesman Joel Bellman said the supervisor’s office had already been in contact with the USGS board, but that the panel has to wait for the formal letter of request to arrive.
Ballard was a former Kentucky slave who came West around 1860 and died in 1905. He and his wife moved to Los Angeles, where he was a teamster and became prominent in the small but growing black community. He was part of a small group that founded Los Angeles’ African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1869.
Read more here: LA County urges name change for Negrohead Mountain