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MLK missing from the map

Unlike 800 other cities, Spokane and CdA haven’t honored King

Kevin Graman
Staff writer
January 22, 2008

It’s too expensive. It’s inconvenient. It’s not a black neighborhood.

There are many reasons not to name a city street after Martin Luther King Jr. and just one to do so: to honor the memory of the civil rights leader. Despite the hurdles, nearly 800 U.S. communities have chosen to name streets for King. Neither Spokane nor Coeur d’Alene is among them.

Today, the communities again will march, make speeches and sing to commemorate the life of King, who was assassinated 40 years ago.

"We celebrate him. Everybody gets involved," said V. Ann Smith, president of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "They all go ‘We Shall Overcome,’ but once the march is over we go our separate ways and live our separate lives.

"It’s as if Spokane doesn’t want to rock the boat. When you hit Eastern Washington, it remains status quo."

In North Idaho, where the community came together to oppose a white supremacist movement, there has been no effort to name a street for King since 1995. That year, Tony Stewart, of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, proposed renaming Rimrock Road, where the Aryan Nations compound then stood, to Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

The effort to torment Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler was short-lived, despite earning support of Spokesman-Review humorist Doug Clark, who wrote: "What better way to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Nuremburg Trials than to tweak our own Hitler-loving hairballs?"

But at the time, renaming a road in Kootenai County required the approval of every affected property owner, even the Nazi ones.

The unanimity rule is not uncommon, and while it appears to be egalitarian, it is anything but, according to an authority on the subject of naming streets in honor of King.

"It is a really easy way for local officials to keep from making controversial decisions," said Derek Alderman, a cultural geographer at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. But streets are public spaces.

"Even though those who live on the streets have a vested interest, they are not the only ones that use the streets," Alderman said. Renaming a street "is a citywide decision."

In 1999, the Rev. Lonnie Mitchell, pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Spokane, filed an application with the city to rename an important corridor through the South Hill. Martin Luther King Jr. Way would have begun at Second Avenue and Arthur, continued as the arterial changed to Newark and then Perry to the intersection of Southeast Boulevard.

But as with a 1991 proposal by then-Mayor Sheri Barnard to rename portions of Market, Greene, Freya, Thor and Ray in honor of King, Mitchell’s plan quickly folded at the first sign of organized opposition.

Business owners in the South Perry Business District said the name change would be too confusing to customers and too costly to change signs, printed material and advertising. Further, they said they were trying to capture the historic nature of the area, which they said dated to the 1890s, according to Spokesman-Review stories about the proposed change.

"People didn’t want it, and we didn’t want to divide the community," Mitchell recalled last week. "There would have been some animosity."

There almost always is, according to Alderman.

In the Northwest, Portland, Seattle and Tacoma overcame opposition to name streets for King.

"Often, it is easy to feel this resistance only happens to us, but it is a constant pattern across the country," Alderman said. "It is not so much a resistance to King or his reputation, although there are still a fair number of people who do not see eye-to-eye with King’s vision." Polls show a general respect for King among most Americans.

"With the exception of white supremacists, it’s hard to find people opposed to his notion of equality and racial integration," Alderman said. "But personal identification with King is another matter."

Part of that has to do with the stigma of streets named for King running through economically depressed areas. It is a stereotype Alderman and his colleagues found to be false in a study published last March in the "Social Science Quarterly."

"We are not suggesting some of these streets don’t have economic issues or struggles," Alderman said. "What we are saying is that King’s name in and of itself is not bad for business."

In many cases, the streets chosen are in parts of town that are poor to begin with, mostly black neighborhoods that support the name change.

Alderman calls this "a segregation of King’s memory."

"Those same boundaries and lines of segregation still exist," he said. "For all this talk about how street naming is unimportant, it really is an important indicator of where we are in terms of race relations."

What opponents of street-naming proposals see as economic concerns, proponents often see as racial bias. This dichotomy may be the result of how blacks and whites define racism.

Alderman cited the work of sociologist Robert Blauner, who said, "Whites locate racism in color consciousness and its absence in color blindness." Blacks, however, define racism in terms of power, "even in the absence of explicitly stated prejudicial attitudes."

Whites tend to think of racism in America as a thing of the past, but "when African-Americans can’t do the simplest thing such as getting a street named for King, that symbolizes a lack of power and the racism they have had to endure for so long," Alderman said.

Instead of thinking about the cost and inconvenience of changing a street name to honor King, perhaps a community should think about the price of not changing the name, Alderman said.

"What is the cost of marginalization?"

Related news: This could be the year

A civic leader says the time has come to name a Spokane street for Martin Luther King Jr.

"We sometimes have to catch communities when they are ready," said Ivan Bush, an equal opportunity officer for Spokane Public Schools. "I have faith that Spokane is ready this year."

Though no street has been selected yet, Bush said, in the next few months a grass-roots movement will come forward – "folks of good intentions and goodwill who recognize the contributions Dr. King made to our country and our world."

In the past, Bush said, there was inadequate work done to build consensus for the proposal. He believes this year will be different.

If a proposal is brought forward, it ultimately must win City Council approval. In 2003, council changed the law to put the Plan Commission, instead of the hearing examiner, in charge of the street-naming process.

In doing so, council is no longer required to automatically approve a street name change absent an appeal.

Nevertheless, Bush remains confident that there will be a street named for King this year, the 40th anniversary of the civil rights leader’s assassination.

"It’s bigger than me, bigger than you and bigger than just a mayor or business person," Bush said. "Good things prevail and I think this will prevail."

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