Since I seem to have precipitated this, and the discussion has veered into the direction of "political correctness," I'd like to make another brief comment. Geographic landforms, like city streets -- and cave names for that matter -- are *always* having their names changed, and this is not always a bad thing. In Austin they changed "Auditorium Shores" to "Stevie Ray Vaughn Park" a while back, and I didn't notice anyone complaining about political correctness.
I remember someone once telling me an amusing story of a cave that was found in the TAG region. The landowners tended to be of a conservative mindset and they suggested many names for cave features such as the "Ronald Reagan Turnaround" and so on. The cavers who actually mapped the cave tended to be iconoclastic as cavers sometimes are, and while they made the map with the feature names the landowner suggested, they also made their own secret map with their own names of a different and extremely NC17-rated kind. Of course as in all good stories, the maps got accidentally switched with hilarious results.
We are members of a living society, and sometimes it really is appropriate to change place names when we decide that we wish to memorialize different things. We can respect the past without being chained to it. In the case of trivial geographic features -- sand bars and small creeks -- I think it is within the purview of the mapping agency to quietly change those which most people would agree are extremely offensive. I wish that there were some consistent system for doing this and recording that it has been done, to facilitate research. Unfortunately that does not seem to be the case. And I suspect that a large number of offensive names have simply "vanished" from new editions of maps without any kind of record kept at all, simply because the rural population has declined in many areas and there is nobody around to argue the point. All the more reason to get into map collecting!
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