‘Negro Heads’ reef off Branford renamed, clearing Connecticut map of offensive word

© Don Stacom/Hartford Courant/TNS A sign along Route 69 in Burlington. Officials in Burlington and neighboring Bristol campaigned to change the name. The word “Negro” also was used for a reef off Branford, but earlier this year the federal government approved name changes for both places.

A reef in Long Island Sound has been renamed to remove the word “Negro,” clearing the state map of any reference to the once common but now offensive label for Black people.

“Totoket Bar” replaced “Negro Heads” on nautical charts marking the outcropping 2.8 miles southeast of Branford, according to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. In a change also finalized earlier this year, “Freeman Hill Brook” replaced “Negro Hill Brook” for the name of a stream that flows from Burlington into Bristol.

The reef’s new name is from the Quinnipiac word for the onshore area north of the bar, according to the federal agency. State Rep. Sean Scanlon, D-Guilford, whose district also covers part of Branford, said former state Sen. Ted Kennedy Jr. led the name change campaign.

“I give Sen. Kennedy a lot of credit for bringing this up when things like this were often swept under the rug,” Scanlon said Tuesday.

Totoket, however, was not the first Native American name to be proposed for the quarter-mile-long reef.

In 2017, Kennedy was on hand when Branford High School student Kelly Tiernan’s essay was announced as winner of a name change contest. Tiernan favored “Sowheag Rocks” after a 17th-century Native American chief.

Unlike Negro Heads, the proposed name honored local and regional history, officials who judged the contest found. As sachem of the Mattabesec and Wangunk tribes, Sowheag sold the area that is now Branford to European settlers in 1638.

But Connecticut’s Native American community objected to the name, according to an email from State Geologist Margaret Thomas that Scanlon shared with The Courant. A name change application was not filed with the federal agency, Thomas wrote, until a consensus for a proposed name could be reached among Native American tribes. The reason for the objection to Sowheag could not be immediately determined.

Scanlon said he learned of the official name change only recently from a Facebook post. A person who had been fishing off Branford saw Negro Heads on a GIS map and raised an alarm that such a name was still in use, Scanlon said. He made some inquiries and learned that the name had been changed, but was still being used on mapping software. The next step, he said, is to get the software changed.

U.S. maps and charts once were peppered with place names that include the word negro.

Negro creeks, hills and hollows were common across the nation, particularly in the South and West.

In 2017, the Branford reef and Bristol brook were the only federally recognized land and sea features in Connecticut that retained negro. In many other states, however, the word is still found in official place names. Massachusetts, for example, still has a reef called Negro Ledge and a Negro Pond in Plymouth.

Changing a federally recognized place name is not easy.

The guiding principle of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names is to retain names found in local usage, except when a name is shown to be “highly offensive or derogatory to a particular racial or ethnic group, gender or religious group.”

“The board, however, is conservative in this matter,” according to its written policy, “and prefers to interfere as little as possible within the use of names in everyday language because attitudes and perceptions of words considered to be pejorative vary between individuals and can change connotation from one generation to another.”

The federal government has banned only two widespread usages, replacing a racial slur for African Americans with negro in 1963 and substituting Japanese for the shorter, derogatory term in 1974.

Original names were marked on maps and charts after President Benjamin Harrison created the geographic names board in 1890. Topographers went around the country asking local people the names of every land feature and waterway.

Walker Pond in Milford, for instance, had been labeled Negro’s Pond and before that, two variants of a racial slur for African Americans, before it was renamed after a local pastor.

Jesse Leavenworth can be reached at jleavenworth@courant.com

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