{"id":2726,"date":"2011-09-29T00:32:44","date_gmt":"2011-09-29T06:32:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/?p=2726"},"modified":"2011-09-29T00:32:44","modified_gmt":"2011-09-29T06:32:44","slug":"sbc-name-changes-dixie-family-pride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/?p=2726","title":{"rendered":"SBC Name Changes, Dixie & Family Pride"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since SBC President Bryant Wright’s September 19 announcement to the Executive Committee that he had unilaterally appointed an “unofficial” task force <\/a>to study changing the name of the Southern Baptist Convention, there have been many new names that have been suggested.\u00a0 Some of the names\u00a0I have\u00a0seen\u00a0bandied about at SBC Voices <\/a>are:\u00a0 Evangelical Baptist Convention<\/em>, Assembly of Evangelical Baptists<\/em>, and the Great Commission Baptist Network<\/em>.\u00a0 Dr. Steve Lemke, at SBC Today<\/a>, although not endorsing a name change, has nevertheless\u00a0proposed Fellowship of Baptist Christians<\/em>\u00a0(FBC) as a potential new name.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday over at SBC Voices, in a comment on my OP, “SBC Name Change: Silence of Elder Statesmen Deafening,”<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>a new name was thrown into the ring:\u00a0\u00a0Dixie Baptist Convention<\/em>.\u00a0 I don’t know what to say.\u00a0 It’s hard enough having an entire region of the country share my name, but now the largest Protestant body in the United States.\u00a0 I’m not sure I could live up to such pressure!<\/p>\n

For those who have never taken the time to read the “About” <\/a>page here at From Law to Grace, let me share a little bit about my name.\u00a0 My full name is Dixie Howell Scott, II.\u00a0 I was named after my father, Dixie Howell\u00a0Scott, who himself was named in honor of\u00a0Millard Fleming\u00a0“Dixie” Howell.\u00a0 For Alabama Crimson Tide fans, the name Dixie Howell will ring a bell.\u00a0 Howell\u00a0played on the 1934 Rose Bowl Champion Crimson Tide team with future legends Paul “Bear” Bryant and Don Hutson (who went on to play with the Green Bay Packers).\u00a0 “Dixie” Howell, who was the 1935 Rose Bowl MVP,\u00a0was also\u00a0named to the\u00a0all-time Rose Bowl\u00a0Team and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1970.<\/p>\n

Growing up in the small central Florida town of Lake Placid, my father was a well-respected funeral director and community leader.\u00a0 Everyone knew Dixie.\u00a0 From as early an age as I can remember, I have, for the most part, used my middle name, Howell.\u00a0 It wasn’t because I wasn’t proud of my first name, but rather because that’s the name my parents began using when I was an infant.\u00a0 Since I could not rightly be called a “Junior,” Howell became the name that everyone knew me by.\u00a0 That was, until I went north for college.<\/p>\n

At George Washington University in Washington, D.C., it would be safe to say that I was a fish out of water.\u00a0 A southern, Christian boy in a hostile environment,\u00a0with an interchangeable middle and last name and a first name that, despite it’s use with males in the first part of the 20th century, was not only uncommon, but also now considered to be a “girl’s” name.\u00a0 And believe me, no\u00a0young man\u00a0in their freshman year of college wants\u00a0to carry such baggage.\u00a0\u00a0What to do?<\/p>\n

In a frantic attempt to hide my name so that my fellow students and fraternity brothers — almost all of whom were from states like New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut — would not find out my real name, I tried to use my middle name.\u00a0 It didn’t work.\u00a0 In every class, the official roster, from which the Professors would take roll, had my full name:\u00a0 Dixie Howell Scott, II.\u00a0\u00a0For the first few classes, I tried in vain to get them to use\u00a0Howell, but\u00a0I finally\u00a0gave up and resigned myself to the fact that I would, at least in class, be known as Dixie.<\/p>\n

However, the fraternity — Phi Sigma Kappa, Lambda Chapter\u00a0— would be a different story.\u00a0 Or so I thought.\u00a0 Attempting to blend into this mix of predominantly Jewish and\u00a0Roman Catholic band of brothers from the northeast, I just knew that they would not like the\u00a0name Dixie.\u00a0 At the time, I wasn’t too crazy about it myself.\u00a0 Because\u00a0of my name, associated with all things southern, I figured that the best thing to do would be to\u00a0hide my\u00a0first name and just go by Howell.<\/p>\n

On the night of our induction as pledges into PSK,\u00a0it stood to reason that a\u00a0guy named\u00a0Howell, who lived in Thurston Hall, along with Bob, his roommate from Denver, would both\u00a0somehow end up with pledge names related to Gilligan’s Island<\/em>.\u00a0 When the Inductor (Pledge Master) came up\u00a0behind me and said, “Your pledge name is cups,” it took me a moment to\u00a0get it.\u00a0 Needless to say, from that moment on, I have been known as Dixie to my fraternity brothers and friends from G.W.U.<\/p>\n

Dixie Howell Scott, II is the name that I have lived with my entire life.\u00a0 While it has not always been an easy name to carry, I am extremely proud to bear the name of my father.\u00a0 In many ways,\u00a0we are known by our names.\u00a0 With that, we take the good and the bad.\u00a0 I would be lying if I said that I had never thought about changing my name?\u00a0 Anyone with an unusual name (I think a man named Dixie in the 21st century qualifies)\u00a0has certainly entertained those thoughts.<\/p>\n

But, it seems like the older I get, the more that I like my name.\u00a0 My fondness for my own name doesn’t come from sentiment, nostalgia, heritage, or tradition.\u00a0 It comes from the fact that my name says who I am.\u00a0 Oh, I suppose I could change my name to something more hip and cool, like Seven, but a name change would not really\u00a0alter who I am or who I hope to be.\u00a0 My fraternity brothers would still call me Dixie (or “Dix” for short).\u00a0 My mother and sister would still call me Howell.\u00a0 And, my wife would just call me crazy!<\/p>\n

By changing my name, would it allow this southern boy with the racial moniker to overcome barriers to\u00a0establishing more relationships with people from different races, religions, or regions?\u00a0 Perhaps, but then again, no one — absolutely no one — has ever rejected my friendship\u00a0because of my first name.\u00a0 Rejected for other reasons, to be sure, but not the name.\u00a0 I give people more credit than to knee-jerk dismiss someone because\u00a0of their name.\u00a0 In the end, maybe the hang-up with names is more our problem than it is their’s.\u00a0 Well, that’s the way that Dixie Howell\u00a0Scott, II sees it, anyway.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since SBC President Bryant Wright’s September 19 announcement to the Executive Committee that he had unilaterally appointed an “unofficial” task force to study changing the name of the Southern Baptist Convention, there have been many new names that have been suggested.\u00a0 Some of the names\u00a0I have\u00a0seen\u00a0bandied about at SBC Voices are:\u00a0 Evangelical Baptist Convention, Assembly…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16,35,37],"tags":[1401,1405,183,1406,1407,1367,1403,417,439,468,1399,1363,1398,1402,778,1404,868,1240,1241,3393,939,1400],"class_list":["post-2726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-religion","category-southern-baptist-convention","tag-alabama-crimson-tide","tag-all-american","tag-bryant-wright","tag-college-football-hall-of-fame","tag-dixie","tag-dixie-howell-scott","tag-don-hutson","tag-from-law-to-grace","tag-george-washington-university","tag-gwu","tag-millard-dixie-howell","tag-name-change","tag-names","tag-paul-bear-bryant","tag-phi-sigma-kappa","tag-rose-bowl","tag-sbc","tag-sbc-today","tag-sbc-voices","tag-southern-baptist-convention","tag-steve-lemke","tag-university-of-alabama"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1LP7G-HY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2726"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2742,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2726\/revisions\/2742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}