In an edited extract from The Address Book, Deirdre Mask looks at the fate of streets named after Martin Luther King Jr.
In April 1957, Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to St. Louis to give a speech. He'd had a busy year. The bus boycott in
Montgomery was a roaring success. The Supreme Court had formally declared bus segregation unconstitutional. In March, King had made the long trip to Ghana with his wife to celebrate its newfound independence from Britain. Only 28 years old, King had, reluctantly, become the face of the civil rights movement.
Eight thousand people gathered in Kiel Center, St. Louis University's basketball arena, to hear him speak. "It's good to be in St. Louis," King began, and he congratulated the city on its progress in race relations. Lunch counters had been integrated. "Certainly the cities in the Deep South have a great deal to learn from a city like St. Louis," he said. Integration had happened "without a lot of trouble," even "smoothly and peacefully."
The crowd punctuated King's words with their own, calling out "yes," "go ahead," or "amen" after nearly every sentence.
But he didn't let the crowd off easily. King said the community needed individuals who would "lead the people who stand today amid the wilderness of the promised land of freedom and justice."
"Yes, yes, yes!" the audience called back. "This," King told the crowd, "is the challenge of the hour."
***
In the United States, a proposal to name a street after King has sometimes ignited a race war. A 1993, in Americus, Georgia, a white fire official said he supported naming half of a street for King, so long as the other half could be named for James Earl Ray, his assassin. In Miami-Dade County, Florida, Martin Luther King Jr. signs were painted over with "General Robert E. Lee." In 2002, a motorist mowed down newly erected MLK street signs in Mankato, Minnesota, while shouting racist epithets. In 2005 in Muncie, Indiana, a county employee allegedly said that the street name proponents were "acting like niggers." The Department of Justice had to send in a mediator who worked with local citizens for three months. Fights have erupted even in cities that we now consider progressive. Austin's King Street was born in 1975 only after J.J. Seabrook, president emeritus of the historically black Huston-Tillotson University, died of a heart attack while passionately appealing for the change. Emma Lou Linn, a white council member, attempted to save his life; a widely published photograph of her administering CPR at the podium sent death threats her way. In 1990, in Portland, Oregon, fifty thousand people signed a petition against renaming a street after Martin Luther King. Dozens of people heckled outside the renaming ceremony. A judge declared a planned public vote on the street name illegal.
***
As I write, the St. Louis suburb of Ladue, which is 87 percent white, has a median household income of $203,250. About seven miles away, the zip code around MLK Drive is 94 percent black, and the neighborhood's median income is about $27,608. "It's ironic," Professor Derek Alderman, a geographer who frequently writes about MLK streets, told me, "that we have attached the name of one of the most famous civil rights leaders of our time to the streets that speak to the very need to continue the civil rights movement." King was an ordinary man himself and a reluctant leader. He panicked at being called to such service at a young age. He saw his work as inspiring people to organize in their own communities. King's struggle was not a lonely one - he was part of thousands of ordinary people struggling and suffering and fighting for change. But King, I imagine, wouldn't care that his streets were in low-class areas. He championed the poor, and he would not be ashamed to have his name linked with the very people he gave his life for. It's hard to imagine that he would want to drink coffee out of a chemistry beaker, or choose from twelve different kinds of macaroni and cheese, as I saw people do on Delmar [Boulevard, about a mile and a half from MLK Drive]. It's the underlying poverty, the despair, the kids kicking dust in the empty lots that would rouse him to action.
