There are lots of Southern California streets named after historical heroes. One street honors a man who was a human rights activist 500 years ago. Randy Young knows the stories behind the "Street Names of Pacific Palisades." That's the name of his book. He says, "One of the streets we were kind of fooled on. It was Las Casas and we thought 'the houses.'"

But the street was actually named after a priest, Father Bartolome Las Casas, who was on the second voyage of Christopher Columbus. Young says he was the first European to recognize that Indians had rights.

Las Casas owned large estates in Cuba, but became appalled at the treatment of the native population. "He freed all of his slaves," Young says, "and then came back to Europe and wrote these marvelous treatises about how Indians were people too, and should be treated as such. And so here's a street that looked like just a mundane Spanish translation of houses, and suddenly became a marvelous story about a hero."

Las Casas spent the rest of his life fighting for Indian rights.

(Airdate for this story: 8/18/07)