WASHINGTON - Rarely do the renaming of United States post offices receive backlash on the House floor, but the one for poet and civil rights leader Maya Angelou did on Tuesday.
Rep. Alex Mooney, R-W.Va., was one of nine members of Congress who voted against renaming a North Carolina post office for Angelou.
Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., urged members to think before voting on North Carolina Democratic Rep. Alma Adams' bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service at 200 Town Run Lane in Winston-Salem, N.C., as the "Maya Angelou Memorial Post Office."
"It's always a big decision when you name a local post office after someone and I just ask the chair, on this issue, to I think people should investigate Maya Angelou a little bit," Grothman said on the floor. "And I suggest, perhaps, if you want to investigate a little bit further that perhaps you Google Maya Angelou and look at other articles in places like the [The American Thinker], the American Spectator."
There's an American Spectator article from the day Angelou passed away in 2014, which says "she was a hardcore lefty who supported Fidel Castro, but she also supported the Second Amendment."
Two days later on May 30, 2014, the Spectator wrote again about Angelou: "At her most irresponsible, she embraced Fidel Castro, Malcolm X, and Bill Clinton - a mistake for a lady of any age." The article continued, "the doctor without a doctorate became a teacher without students at Wake Forest," and quoted a Spectator article written by a Wake Forest student 21 years prior.
The American Thinker on May 30, 2014, cited the Spectator articles and called Angelou "the late poet/madam/actress/communist/all around phony."
Both the American Spectator and the American Thinker are conservative publications.
In a vote to suspend the rules and pass the bill, the measure passed 371-9. Besides Mooney and Grothman, the Republicans who voted against the bill were Reps. Mo Brooks of Alaska, Ken Buck of Colorado, Michael C. Burgess of Texas, Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, Andy Harris of Maryland, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Steven M. Palazzo of Mississippi. Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, voted present.
Rep. Steve Russell, R-Okla., supported the bill. On the floor, he said Angelou was born in St. Louis, but moved to Winston-Salem in 1981 to be a professor at Wake Forest University. She served there for more than 30 years.