They change the name of a road in Arkansas...

... and the Associate Press inflates it into a megatrend. "[T]he South is slowly erasing reminders of its Civil War past for fear of offending tourists and scaring off business."

I counted only four examples of name changes in this article, two of them at universities.

This is fairly classic hackwork: take a few incidents, talk to a few sources, and run with the story. The reporter altogether forgot to count the number of new businesses registered every year sporting "Dixie" or some such in the title. That kind of research would indicate a trend better than this freewheeling "impressionism."