Country band, The Dixie Chicks renamed themselves The Chicks in June during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests. It came alongside the release of their new song, March March, and its music video, which features the names of Black victims of police brutality.
They have previously come under fire for making a statement that criticized former President George W. Bush and his decision to invade Iraq, causing their popularity among mostly right-wing country music fans to decline, with some even burning their CDs quickly.
‘Dixie’ was a term used to refer to southern US states during slavery because of the Mason-Dixon Line, which separated those free and those enslaved at the time and was also the name of a blackface minstrel character dating back to the 1850s. Then in the 1940s, it was adopted by the Dixiecrats or The States’ Rights Democratic, a right-wing segregationist party primarily active in the south.
Dixie was also the name of a song sung by Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. The same song was part of the 1915 Birth of a Nation’s score, which helped revive the KKK. In the 1950s, it was sung by white women protesting against integration in schools.
In Utah, Dixie State University will also have its name changed following a unanimous vote by the Utah Board of Higher Education. The college has previously removed a statue called ‘The Rebels’ featuring a Confederate soldier holding a Confederate flag on a horse. It also replaced the university’s mascot, Rebel to Red Storm and then to Trailblazers, named after Samuel Brooks, the college’s first student who slept on the steps outside waiting for it to open.
Sources: NPR, Dixie State University, The Atlantic, Distracitfy, 11 Alive
