Nine Republicans Reject Naming Post Office After Maya Angelou


Conversations around racial issues have grown super charged during this presidential election season and part of that seems to have rubbed off on Capitol Hill in a debate over naming a post office after award-winning poet and Civil Rights activist, Maya Angelou.
“While Maya Angelou did many good things in her life, Congressman Mo Brooks (AL-5) did not believe it appropriate to name an American Post Office after a communist sympathizer and thereby honor a person who openly opposed America’s interest by supporting Fidel Castro and his regime of civil rights suppression, torture and murder of freedom-loving Cubans,” Lauren Vandiver, a spokesperson for Brooks, told NBC News in a statement.

Other Republican lawmakers who voted "no" had similar reasons.

“Congressman Harris voted against the Maya Angelou post office naming because she was a communist sympathizer. His parents escaped communism and he feels that he cannot vote to name a post office in the United States in honor of someone who supported the communist Castro revolution in Cuba,” Shelby Hodgkins, a spokesperson in the office of Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., wrote NBC News in a statement.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna529351