Door by door, a push to rename Confederate streets for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor
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It was at the townhouse with the black welcome mat — a skinny beige building on South Floyd Street — where Alex Sprague managed to collect signature No. 4.
“I’m starting a petition to get this street renamed. Is that something that interests you?” the 25-year-old asked upon ringing the doorbell, clipboard in hand.
The man standing inside, barefoot and in sweatpants, was halfway through shutting the door before curiosity got the best of him. “What are you renaming it to?” he asked. “And why?”
Like many of his neighbors, the man had given little thought to the namesake for this quiet four-block strip in Alexandria’s Seminary Hill neighborhood: former Virginia governor John Buchanan Floyd, a brigadier general in the Confederate Army.
But as Sprague explained, Floyd is not the only Confederate whose name appears on nearby addresses. At least 40 other streets in this Northern Virginia city also honor Confederate leaders, largely thanks to a city ordinance that at one point required it for all new roadways running north to south.
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