LSU renames campus street named for Confederate Navy officer

Published 8:35 am Tuesday, November 28, 2017

BATON ROUGE (AP) — Louisiana State University is renaming a street that had been named after an officer in the Confederate navy.

Raphael Semmes Road will become Veterans Drive. The university included the switch on a list of two dozen street changes announced Monday, part of a “road modernization” plan approved by the LSU Board of Supervisors.

The university says the effort is aimed at improving location-finding on campus. Unnamed roads will get names and a handful of streets, like Raphael Semmes Road, will be renamed.

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LSU says research determined whether people with roads named for them had made a significant campus contribution. The university says many “were named without a formal process.”

Semmes was a rear admiral in the Confederacy who later worked as an LSU professor, according to the Civil War Trust.