Simply because nobody cares about the names unless somebody intentionally drags the names out and teaches about them for the purpose of creating offense and ill-will. There's enough crap without manufacturing it.
I grew up in a little berg in Maryland with, of course, street names. Delmar. Ritchie. McComas. Wells. Ross. Armistead. Salisbury.
We knew who McComas and Wells were because we were told. They were those who fired some of the first shots in the Battle of North Point, part of the Battle of Baltimore. They were marksmen, and killed presumably having shot at the British commander leading his forces to take Baltimore. That's the tradition.
Delmar, Ritchie, Armistead, Salisbury were mysteries and, you know, nobody cared. I was fuzzy on who Ross was. So just today I dug into those names. Armistead was a commander in the war of 1812 around Baltimore, so that 1812 theme continued. Ross was the British commander. Yup, the street three blocks away was named for the British invader who would have captured Baltimore and then Fort McHenry from the rear. At least he was killed by the teenage boys, Wells and McComas.
That left Delmar, Ritchie, Salisbury. Turns out these three names have something in common. In the early-mid 1930s there was a movement to form a separate all-white state of Delmarva, with a bit of a riot in 1933 called the Battle of Salisbury (the biggest city in erstwhile Delmarva). Guess who was governor in 1933? Yup: Ritchie.
So this nice little area had streets named after the defenders of Baltimore, patriots--except for Ross, the evil dead Brit. But the street names came with a tip of the hat to a bit of Maryland overtly racist sedition which, oddly, I'd never heard of and can't quite find the interest to be offended at. (The neighborhood was platted and the first houses built in the mid '30s, when the Delmarva thing was current events. It was originally deed restricted but then again, what wasn't in the '30s?)
On the other hand, I'd never know some of that history without having the street names to hang it on. I mean, I went to Stricker High School, a pointless name if ever there was one. Stricker was another commander--this one on the American side--during the Battle of North Point.
What needs to be renamed to placate delicate sensibilities and remove all traces of these horrible events from the minds of young innocents? The references to Delmar(va) and the (battle of) Salisbury? Can we keep Ritchie? Does Ross, the British invader, have to go? Or is the idea of the war of 1812 with a current close ally enough to keep dead-guy Ross--or maybe make even Wells and McComas too inconvenient? Or is the very idea of a war with people being killed in what's now the junior high football field and troops marching through where my elementary school play ground was simply too much? Might have nightmares of nasty red coats.
It costs money to rename things,and most people don't think of those names as "honoring" anybody, even if they know who the honorees are.
Save the money.
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