Today there are multiple stretches that carry the Dixie Highway name in Florida and, as conversations continue to play out about what to do with Confederate monuments, there is a growing interest in changing the name. In Hallandale Beach, where Mr. Jackson lives, a resolution supporting a name change was recently approved, but not without some pushback.

“Dixie Highway was this ambitious project starting in 1915. It was later absorbed into some state and federal systems,” said Tammy Ingram, the author of “Dixie Highway: Road Building and the Making of the Modern South, 1900-1930.” “The name Cotton Belt Route was considered, too, but Dixie was chosen to promote the South.”

Dixie is thought to be a reference to the Mason-Dixon line, although the origins of the term are still debated by historians. The minstrel song of the same name was adopted as a kind of anthem of the Confederacy during the Civil War. “By the time of the Civil War, the term Dixie was racialized, and a romanticized reference to the antebellum South,” said Dr. Ingram, an associate professor of history at the College of Charleston.

It was an email from a retired businessman and the words of a Miami-Dade County commissioner that led several leaders in South Florida to consider changing the name in parts of the region.

In July, Modesto Abety-Gutierrez was driving on South Dixie Highway in Miami on the way to drop his 16-year-old granddaughter, Isabella Banos, off at a friend’s house. When Isabella noticed the sign, she asked her grandfather why a name that symbolized slavery was still being used. She later suggested Harriet Tubman Highway as an alternative.