Plantation Road is now Tommie Lee Wyatt Lane: new signs are up in South Austin

The street signs on Plantation Road in South Austin have been replaced. The road is now Tommie Lee Wyatt Lane, and new signs went up as of Oct. 14, according to an Oct. 20 memo from Transportation and Public Works Director Richard Mendoza. Residents and businesses on the road were notified of the change, the memo says, so people with that address should update their records.

The memo formally closes the council's 2025 request to rename the road.

The road and the honoree

The road runs south of West William Cannon Drive and east of Brodie Lane, through Kincheonville, a farming community founded by freed people in 1865, Community Impact reported. Its old name had been flagged as a high priority for renaming because of its ties to slavery.

Tommie Lee Wyatt co-founded The Black Registry of Austin Businesses in 1969 and The Villager newspaper in 1973, and died in January 2026, according to the outlet. In the city's public survey, about 53% of the more than 120 people who responded supported the new name and about 35% opposed it, Community Impact reported. The new signs cost $1,592, paid from the transportation department's budget.

A section of nearby Paisano Trail was renamed Zion Rest Lane at the same meeting, after the Zion Rest Missionary Baptist Church, which has served the area for more than a century.

What our records add

Two votes, a year apart. The council started the process on June 5, 2025, approving a resolution on consent, 11-0. Council Member Paige Ellis was the lead sponsor, with Natasha Harper-Madison, Ryan Alter and Vanessa Fuentes as co-sponsors. At that meeting Ellis said the road affects Districts 8 and 5 and that staff had listed it as a leading candidate for renaming.

The council approved the renaming ordinance after a public hearing on July 23, 2026, 10-0, with Fuentes absent. The Paisano Trail change passed by the same count.

What was said. Before the July 23 vote, Ellis tied both renamings to a 2019 council resolution calling for renaming city assets that honored the Confederacy and slavery. She described Wyatt as a civil rights activist, business leader and publisher and noted that the road is shared by Districts 5 and 8 and runs through the former freedmen's colony.

The process the memo describes. A stakeholder process led by the District 5 and District 8 offices, with city staff support, produced the ordinance, according to the memo. The council waived parts of the city's street-name-change code to adopt it, the ordinance title shows.

What's next

No further council action is needed. Questions go to Amica Bose, assistant director of Transportation and Public Works, according to the memo. The road is represented by Council Members Alter (District 5) and Ellis (District 8). Ellis is not on the ballot this fall; voters choose the next District 8 member on Nov. 3, as our District 8 story explains.