A mere 44 years after his assassination in their city, the Memphis and Shelby County Land Use Control Board has
decided to rename a prominent nine-block stretch of street in its downtown tourist area Dr. Martin Luther King Avenue. Memphis will now join some 900 other U.S. cities that have previously named streets after King. Good for them. Finally is definitely better than never.
Every time this happens, however, I wonder why it is that other African American leaders have so few streets (or schools or libraries or parks) named after them. Well, actually, I don't wonder. It's all too apparent. Cultural amnesia runs deep in America. It's informed by all the same stereotypes and prejudices and studied forgetfulness that immerses us everywhere we turn. Like all cultural aspects of our lives, it is relentlessly reinforced. When it comes to naming some public space, a roadway or whatever else, it's almost as if there has only ever been one notable African American.
Sure, there's a Harriet Tubman Street and park named after her in Knoxville, Tenn., and there's legislation working its way through the Senate to establish the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park. In Rochester, N.Y., there is a Frederick Douglass Street, a Frederick Douglass Circle in Manhattan and a Frederick Douglass Bridge in D.C. Malcolm X Boulevard is paired with Lenox Avenue in Harlem. But, seriously, is that all there is? Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a founder of the Ku Klux Klan, has more named after him than that.
And where is the plethora of parkways named for W.E.B. Du Bois? Where are the dozens of public schools named for Sojourner Truth? Why aren't there 100 towns with avenues named for Medgar Evers, 200 libraries named for Thurgood Marshall, 300 parks named for Shirley Chisholm, a dozen medical centers named for Dr. Daniel Hale Williams?
Naming public space, whether roads or buildings, is hardly the most important issue on the plate of most people in this era of program cuts and lay-offs, of wars and rumors of war, of deepening poverty, pinched resources, too-rapidly melting ice, everyone being asked to do more, more, more with less and less. But we attach names for a purpose, to honor and hold in memory. And our choices in this matter seem to say we would rather forget.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2007:
By now, John McCain’s identity as a "maverick" has been pretty well demolished among thinking people, though it retains a tenacious grip on certain sectors of the media. In light of McCain’s support for overturning Roe v. Wade, his cave on torture, his hiring of significant numbers of Bush-Cheney staffers, his turn to Bush’s big donors, and, of course, the McCain doctrine of Iraq war escalation, you’d think that it would be the joke among journalists it is among bloggers, but what can I say? I guess they’re slow.
Those journalists so desperate for a maverick presidential candidate, though, should take a look at former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (pronounced Gra-VEL), a long-shot Democratic candidate for president. Like McCain, if elected, Gravel would be the oldest president. Like McCain, Gravel’s major political experience is in the US Senate (1969-1981). Gravel also is a veteran, having served in the Army in the Counter Intelligence Corps in the early 1950s. And just as McCain's initial reputation was made on an act of Vietnam-era courage – refusing to be released from POW status early – in his past, so was Gravel's – entering the Pentagon Papers into the public record via his Senate subcommittee on Buildings and Grounds, and filibustering the renewal of the draft. But unlike McCain, Gravel is genuinely a maverick, with the good and the bad that comes with that status.
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