Martin Luther King Drives, Avenues, and Boulevards

While visiting my family in Atlanta over winter break, we spent one night at a comedy club. The acts were moderately funny, as one would expect from a local comedy club, but one joke stuck with me. The comedian, a black father in his 30s, joked about how he always knew that he should avoid streets named after Martin Luther King, Jr, because they inevitably turned out to be "sketchy as f**k." How ironic, he went on to say, that streets named after an African-American icon of peace were places that one avoided after dark.

Chris Rock made a similar joke:

 And a friend on Facebook shared a meme with essentially the same message:

Why is this joke so prevalent? Why are MLK Streets universally understood to be dangerous and "sketchy as f**k"?

According to Guillermo G. Caliendo, the reputation of  King streets are "a direct result of racial (mis)representations in public memory."  "King streets," he suggests, "can be used euphemistically to signify a sense of Blackness, poor Black people, and even a dangerous neighborhood whereby commemoration recalls not social achievements by African Americans but a socioeconomic decay of Black neighborhoods" (Caliendo 1157-1158). Influenced by this negative reputation, businesses (often white-owned) on major thoroughfares generally resist renaming their streets after King, citing financial interests. Because activists are unable to rename major city streets, they often settle for renaming smaller, less traveled roads after King.

Derek Alderman, Professor of Geography at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, has spent the last several years studying the politics of street naming as it pertains to King. Street naming is a popular and relatively easy way to encourage daily interaction with the past, making it "a visible and intimate part of the everyday realm" (Alderman 127). However, according to Alderman, "Honoring King with a street name is often controversial when the road in question challenges long-standing racial and economic boundaries within communities." As a result, "In many instances (but not all), public opposition has led King's name to be socially and geographically marginalized within cities, which has worked to stigmatize these streets and create public anxiety about renaming more prominent streets" (Alderman). 

In other words, we are caught in a negative feedback loop wherein businesses and white folk resist renaming major thoroughfares after King largely because of the negative reputation that of MLK streets. As a result, MLK streets tend to be marginalized and contained within black communities, rather than crossing racial boundaries and connecting disparate communities. Because minority communities are disproportionately impacted by poverty, this marginalization only reinforces the negative reputation of MLK streets, and so the cycle continues.

How do we break out of this negative feedback loop? In order to encourage more positive, more frequent interactions with black history and memory, we must work to counteract the "racial (mis)representations in public memory" of which Caliendo writes. We must make room for and amplify marginalized voices, and and we must lobby privileged people and powerful organizations who have the power to effect immediate change. 

Equally important is the need to economically and socially improve the reality of life on MLK streets and their surrounding neighborhoods that currently fulfill the stereotype. Job creation, economic assistance, improved education, affordable housing: we can take tangible, policy-based steps to combat poverty, as Dr. King knew when he worked on the Poor People's Campaign.

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Further Information:

Derek Alderman's Website, http://mlkstreet.com/

NPR Discussion with Jonathan Tilove, author of Along Martin Luther King: Travels on Black America's Main Street