www.sfgate.comStreets of - Keli DaileySunday, April 3, 2005
Give yourself plenty of time to see the uneasiest street in America.
You can take pictures next to cars with trash bags for windows or near pit bulls guarding women twisting braids in their front yards. You can catch black vendors outside the Apollo Theatre hissing "devil" at tourists or spend an afternoon with a man named Dawg clutching a fistful of crack.
In Portland and Harlem and points between, go find a street named Martin Luther King.
I know you've been told to avoid it. Chris Rock even has a joke that essentially goes:
"If a friend calls you and says 'I'm lost. I'm on Martin Luther King Boulevard' and they want to know what to do, the best response is, 'Run!' "
Well, I've toured them, and I've had to run only a couple of times.
St. Louis has the most rundown MLK with its broken, red brick townhouses and an endless streetscape of wrecking-ball rot. Utah's (for me at least) was the least friendly: At midday I was chased to my car by residents of an apartment complex while the manager looked on. Washington, D.C., has the most tragic MLK, which is lined with T-shirt memorials to young people who've been killed.
More than 700 streets are named in memory of the great civil rights leader, who was slain by an assassin's bullets 37 years ago Monday. But why is it that these roads honoring this nation's answer to Gandhi get largely confined to menacing and mostly black neighborhoods? (There are a few, like the one in Berkeley, that aren't.)
Look at how lifeless it is around here, Paul Johnson tells me, surveying the MLK street in Little Rock, Ark., from behind his old lawn mower. He's looking for yard work just blocks from where nine black teens famously desegregated Central High School in the 1950s. Now the neighborhood is mostly black. Houses with broken windows dot the street.
Does Johnson think this is a good memorial to King? "They ain't never gonna put it where you'd like to see it," he says behind a wry smile. "You know, in a flourishing neighborhood."
What keeps me going back is the streets' amazing consistency. Damn near every MLK feels the same. The streets stretch across 39 states, through hundreds of cities and towns that normally lure visitors with their unique architecture and food -- but never to an MLK, which can almost be guaranteed to have umpteen hair salons and barbershops, the requisite corner markets with overpriced milk and underpriced malt liquor, and public housing worn and bursting at the seams.
The observant visitor will wonder why a man who wrote "Love in Action" sermons and sent telegrams to President John F. Kennedy claiming that dignity was America's destiny is so excessively associated with such vistas. Well, maybe there are some crummy streets honoring George Washington, too. I'm guessing Washington Avenues outnumber MLKs. But here's the difference: I've never heard a word against naming a street after old George.
When Jonathan Tilove calls them "black America's Main Street" in his coffee table book "Along Martin Luther King," it sounds like a great honor. But Tilove glosses over the fact that MLK is, in a sense, code for a black neighborhood, usually blighted.
What would happen if MLK the street were assigned to a white neighborhood? Would it be the naming equivalent of block busting -- when blacks and other minorities move out of traditionally, segregated neighborhoods into white ones, creating white flight panics?
A study published in 2002 indicated that if a black family moved into the neighborhood, almost 40 percent of whites in Detroit, Boston and Atlanta, expecting property values to decline and crime to go up, would simply move out.
When there was talk of an MLK street moving into Zephyrhills, Fla., the owner of a saddler's shop warned the local press that it could keep visitors away and hurt property values.
Capturing the exact likeness of King the man must be challenging or expensive, because the statues I've seen of him vary noticeably in height, nose width and neck thickness. Sometimes the Baptist preacher has props like an open Bible, the U.S. Constitution or a globe. Sometimes his minister's robe looks like a conservative stone dress. Rocky Mount, N.C., has a $56,000 statue that blacks in the community call arrogant and unrealistic. They want it recast.
There's a pretty good likeness of King at a McDonald's in Cincinnati. It's a bronze bust 1 foot high, sitting on a podium across from a gape-mouthed Ronald McDonald. You will find it, of course, on Martin Luther King Drive.
Giving King's name to stretches of asphalt really took off after 1986, the year the Statue of Liberty turned 100 and the federal King holiday began. Funny thing about the newest American holiday: A black Michigan Democrat first proposed it to Congress in April 1968, four days after King was assassinated. Its adoption proved a long struggle.
By 1983, the House actually passed a bill for a King holiday, but conservative senators fought to block it. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., gave the Senate a 300-page document filled with declassified FBI papers to prove King unworthy: J. Edgar Hoover insisted he had communist connections.
Eventually, though, 78 senators voted in favor of the holiday, and President Ronald Reagan signed it into law.
Still, Arizona stubbornly refused to acknowledge the third Monday in January as a paid state holiday until 1992, after tourists threatened a boycott. So it's no surprise that there's just one, scrawny MLK street in all of Arizona.
Shirley Johnson, the teacher's aide who fought to have that cul-de-sac renamed, had been dead 20 years by the time I drove past wide streets named after Washington and Jefferson and pulled up to the six-house semicircle with a "dead end" sign. Phoenix agreed to name this invisible six-pack of all-black households after her hero, but by last summer, three Latino families had moved in. There was no one around, black or Latino, who remembered how Martin Luther King Circle got its name.
Cathy was bouncing around in shorts and sandals, giving me a backyard tour of what not so long before had been a celebrated crack house and is still the circle's modest centerpiece.
"They burned this tree," she chirped, pointing cheerfully at the traumatized sapwood. "And they told us they found a body back here a few years ago."
Still, she's proud of where she lives. "Sometimes I hear about Martin Luther Kings in other places," Cathy told me. "And I'll be like, 'That's my street.' "
In Eugene, Ore., it was formerly Centennial Boulevard. In Chapel Hill, N. C., it had been Airport Road.
On the black side of town, Chapel Hill already had a 700-foot MLK pathway book-ended by a cemetery and a handful of low-income houses that during hurricane season regularly clogged with mud the color and consistency of mashed sweet potatoes.
The local NAACP wanted to trade the muddy MLK for the grander Airport Road that runs through the heart of town to the University of North Carolina, a campus King visited in 1960.
The people who opposed the name change cited the costs of redoing business cards and signs. Some people in favor of the name change called the other side racists.
Soon news pieces appeared bemoaning the ways the drive for racial harmony in Chapel Hill was sputtering. It was an emotional scene: People cried when the Town Council's naming committee agreed to dub Airport Road the new MLK, keeping Historic Airport Road as a secondary designation.
So upgrades are possible, but so are MLK cutbacks. Last year the Zephyrhills, Fla., City Council restored Sixth Avenue's original name after just six months of being an MLK.
I'm still not sure whether the streets named after Martin Luther King are the most or least fitting memorial, the best they could be, for a man who ranked poverty alongside racism and said, "Let us be dissatisfied until those who live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security."
Maybe you can take a look and see for yourself if they're good memorials or not. You might start on the east side of San Antonio, where there was once a mean looking German shepherd named Joe that ate neighborhood kittens. You could visit the gravel and glass schoolyard outside Frederick Douglass Elementary where many a kid skinned a knee, or you could lament the neighborhood graffiti written by a budding Crips gang franchise. While you're at it, check out the barbershop to see if Mr. Inman still runs it. If he's there, tell him a girl named Keli, who grew up just around the corner, sent you.
And when you're on an MLK, keep this in mind: There's a powerful belief in the Southern black folk tradition that a person never dies as long as his name is remembered.
Keli Dailey is a photographer and student at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.
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