BATON ROUGE, La. (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.
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.
