'Redskins' License Plate Sparks Battle

L O S  A N G E L E S, Jan. 13 -- Dale Atkeson's home has a sign over the door: "Redskin Country."

He flies Washington Redskins banners out front and a flag above his deck overlooking the Pacific. He even has a license plate that says "1 REDSKN."

"Generally, what happens is people drive by and they see Redskins, and they'll honk the horn and give me a thumbs-up or something like that," Atkeson said.

But when Eugene Herrod of the Southern California Indian Center searched motor vehicle records he saw that license and asked the Department of Motor Vehicles to revoke the plate.

"The DMV has rejected and revoked plates in the past that read Jap, Chink, Kike," Herrod said.

To a lot of American Indians, Redskin is a similar epithet. Two years ago Herrod's group convinced the state to ban from license plates all configurations of the word Redskin.

‘Just a Football Team’

But to Atkeson, a retired longshoreman who played running back for Washington in the early 1950s, Redskin is a name to be proud of.

"The Redskins, it means a football team," Atkeson said. "That's it, just a football team like the Steelers or the Vikings. I don't think the Vikings are mad."

Atkeson got a letter from the Department of Motor Vehicles demanding that he surrender the plate, "as they are offensive to the American Indian community," Atkeson said.

He looks at this as political correctness to the extreme, but Herrod doesn't.

"If there was a team called Atlanta Negroes, and when the team scored everyone stood up and did a watermelon chop, how long would that last?" Herrod said. "Would that be political correctness? Would it?"

Atkeson is fighting it but expects to lose, saying "You can't fight city hall." And he expects another letter from the DMV for his wife's car. That would be, "RDSKN 2."