There are calls for John Wayne Airport to be renamed after a 1971 Playboy interview resurfaced in which the screen legend made comments that were racist and homophobic.

Now a debate has been sparked over whether his namesake Southern California airport in Orange County should get a new title.

John Wayne died nearly 40 years ago at age 72 but the latest uproar concerns remarks he made in an interview when he was 63 where he spoke of how he believed in 'white supremacy,' at least until 'irresponsible' black people became more educated, and that Native Americans were 'selfishly' trying to keep their land.

Passengers file by the statue of John Wayne at the airport. There is a proposal floating around to change the name of John Wayne Airport after a 1971 interview revealed prejudicial views

'I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people,' he said.

He added that he 'don't feel guilty about the fact that five or 10 generations ago these people were slaves,' adding 'it's just a fact of life, like the kid who gets infantile paralysis and has to wear braces so he can't play football with the rest of us.'

He went onto say that he even believed black people had more advantages in America than whites.

But the insults didn't stop there. When asked which films he considered perverted, Wayne listed 1969's Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy, before using anti-gay slurs in discussing the films further.

Others are calling for calm and worry about the cost involved to change the name of the airport back to Orange County Airport

'Orange County today is such an economically and ethnically diverse community that it's hard to justify asking any member of that community to board planes at an airport named after an outspoken racist and homophobe, with his strutting statue occupying a central niche in front of the concourse,' wrote columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece.

Hiltzik wrote how in 1979, Orange County was a strongly conservative area which may have influenced the decision to name after Wayne - a hero of Westerns and outspoken conservative.

Once the name was chosen, the John Wayne Associates commissioned sculptor Robert Summers to create a nine foot bronze statue of 'the Duke' - which remains in the Thomas F. Riley Terminal on the Arrival Level to this day.

But the areas demographic has long since changed with a more liberal and progressive community making up the majority of the population.

'That should be evident from the results of November's election, in which voters turfed out the county's last remaining GOP members of Congress — some of whom had embraced Donald Trump in a fruitless effort to save their careers--and elected an all-Democratic congressional delegation,' Hiltzik wrote.

'Wayne was a few weeks shy of his 64th birthday when the interview appeared in print,' Hiltzik continued. 'It was 1971, so the civil rights revolution had been going on for years; Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated three years before. Wayne wasn't expressing the tenor of the times — he was reacting to the advances being won by African Americans through demonstrations and legislation.'

A 1971 interview Wayne gave to Playboy magazine showed the prejudice the actor had towards gays, blacks, Native Americans, young people and liberals

Nonetheless, there are those who defend Wayne given the almost 50-year gap since the comments were made and that he was merely expressing commonly-held view at the time of the interview.

'Removing his name from Orange County's airport now only validates what many Americans are coming to believe: You can't say anything anymore, darn it, without being discovered and punished by the mob,' Madeline Fry wrote in the Washington Examiner.

Fry suggested finding the hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars it would take to rebrand the facility Orange County Airport. 'But for goodness sake, not yet,' she adds.