Cities and school boards are naming streets and buildings after President Obama, breaking with the tradition of waiting until a president is out of office. Ludlum Elementary School in Hempstead, N. Y., on Long Island, was renamed after Obama in November. A school in Portland, Ore., is deliberating a similar change. Opa-Locka, Fla., renamed one of its main city streets in December. Hollywood, Fla., is considering doing the same. St. Louis made an honorary name change to a busy road that used to divide white and black neighborhoods. The postal address is still Delmar Boulevard, but the city will also designate the street Barack Obama Boulevard. No precedent The tributes are bound to continue, says Indiana University history professor Edward Linenthal. “On the one hand, you can say it‘s premature," says Linenthal, editor of the Journal of American History. “On the other hand, you can argue that what has happened is extraordinary and astonishing in American history and the naming of streets and schools reflects that sense." John Gillis, editor of the book Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, says he does not know of instances of presidents being commemorated while they were in office, let alone before they took office, as some of the changes were. “This is a trivialization of the serious process of naming," he says. “This is all hope and no memory. It‘s all anticipation and no looking back." Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have been the most popular presidents in the last century for commemorations, Gillis says. Hundreds of schools and civic buildings have been named for them.
Obama is being honored abroad, too. The Associated Press reports that Antigua is renaming 1,300-foot Boggy Peak, its highest spot, Mount Obama. In Perry County, Ala., where the 1965 killing of a black man by a white state trooper in Marion led to the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, commissioners paid tribute to the president by designating the second Monday in November a legal holiday: Barack Obama Day.
USA Today
O autorovi| Stránku připravila Marta Pelechová
