RALEIGH, N.C. — A Thursday afternoon meeting at City Hall will test whether Raleigh will put Clarence E. Lightner’s name on the New Bern Avenue gateway that cuts through Southeast Raleigh toward WakeMed.
Organizers led by community advocate Octavia Rainey booked a Thursday afternoon sit-down on the third floor of City Hall to walk city, state and federal staff through the paperwork a ceremonial street change would require. Neighbors from College Park and Oakwood say they are joining the ask.
Rainey wants the honor applied along the inside-Beltline segment that starts near Person Street and runs out to the hospital corridor, arguing the route still mirrors the districts Lightner shaped after his 1973-75 mayoral term.
Because the same corridor fronts both a U.S. Postal Service downtown station and the Terry Sanford federal courthouse complex, any new roadway label would also force address updates for those federal tenants.
City history files still lock 1973 as the year Clarence Lightner became Raleigh’s first Black mayor. Civic notes add that the win placed him among the earliest Black mayors elected in a large Southern city with a White majority.
Before the mayor’s race, Lightner won a council seat in 1967 — only the second Black member — and helped scrap the old all-at-large election map for district representation. Supporters say that record, plus his later housing and business advocacy, is why the avenue should carry his name.
The pitch arrives while New Bern Avenue is already mid-construction for a rapid bus project described as the first high-speed line of its kind in North Carolina. Rainey framed Lightner on Wednesday as a civil-rights-era trailblazer who kept pressing on housing, transit and Black-owned enterprise after segregation laws fell.
Section: More Raleigh NC politics news
