Rick Perry took criticism over the weekend for a rock outside the Texas hunting camp his family once leased that had the name "Niggerhead" painted on it.
Perry's campaign says the governor's father painted over the rock to cover the name soon after he began leasing the site in the early 1980s and that the Perry family never controlled, owned or managed the property.
But rival Herman Cain, the only black Republican in the race, says the rock symbolizes Perry's insensitivity to race.
For Perry, now Texas governor for 11 years and in the top tier of Republican presidential candidates, a racial issue is already dogging him.
The Washington Post reported that the word was painted on a flat rock standing upright at the gated entrance of the secluded Perry family hunting refuge in Texas.
The 1,070 acre parcel, used for hunting and fishing retreats, was the venue of getaways hosted for decades by Perry, who entertained fellow lawmakers, friends and supporters there, the report said. The Post said that the getaway was given its objectionable name long before being acquired by Perry, but that the Texas governor did not change it for years after obtaining the lease on the property.
The report said Perry had called it "an offensive name that has no place in the modern world," but that questions remained over his handling of the issue.
"Nigger," one of the most reviled words in the American lexicon, is a pejorative word used to denigrate African-Americans.
Defended Confederacy symbols
Eleven years ago, when a leading civil rights group stepped up a campaign to remove the Confederate battle flag from statehouses and other government buildings across the South, it found an opponent in Rick Perry.
Texas had a pair of bronze plaques with symbols of the secessionist Confederacy displayed in its state Supreme Court building. Perry, then lieutenant governor, said they should stay put, arguing that Texans "should never forget our history."
It's a position Perry has taken consistently when the legacy of the Civil War has been raised, as have officials in many of the other former Confederate states, whose secession from the U.S. in 1861 triggered the American Civil War.
*Compiled from AP and AFP by the Daily News Staff
