We have an MLK street here, but since it’s also a U.S. highway, most people still call it that number. I’m not sure it’s racist, because the other U.S. hwy in town is officially named after a well known former senator, and nobody calls that highway by that name. In fact I’d guess I’ve never heard anything about this since the city changed the name.
The first sentence in the quoted material–taken from the OP’s link–is important. Why not have a town meeting proposing the street name change first?
The second sentence is just silly. Are they actually implying changing the name will make the neighborhood economically depressed because MLK streets in some other towns are in poor areas? Us darkies aren’t going to move in just because a street is named after one of our–and America’s–heroes. So they can just stop worrying their pretty little heads about that.
All in all, it sounds like the city council members followed the will of the people.
As to the OP, the MLK Blvd. here in Baltimore seems to bisect some rather depressed neighborhoods from some OK ones, especially as you get closer to the Loft District.
I don’t remember who it is, but some comedian has a bit about how it’s such a shame that MLK was a nonviolent, pacifist leader, and whenever you go to a street named after him you’re probably in the part of town where you’re most likely to get shot. Everywhere I’ve lived this has, indeed, been the case - Columbia, SC now, where there’s a park and a neighborhood named after the man where you don’t go after sundown.
I have never been anywhere without an MLK street, and I’ve never been anywhere where getting lost and seeing that street sign dosen’t mean you have taken a seriously wrong turn. Our recent trip to Charleston resulted in a particularly bad example.
It’s really quite a shame.
An alternate choice was 37th Street. It runs through predominately black neighborhoods. However, there was so much resistance due to the number of private citizens who would have to have their addresses changed it was switched to West Broad.
It’s absolutely amazing how “historic” a street name is once someone proposes to rename it Martin Luther King. I bet if someone tried to rename Fifth Street MLK Street, someone would claim that it was named after Josiah Fifth, the second cousin of the founder of the town, and thus must not be renamed! 
Here is a News Report about it from CNN
If that was directed at my city, I’d just like to point out that it’s been about a week since this idea was floated, and people are happily proposing streets right and left. And, they are just as talkative and worried about changing a street to be named after the single most revered city father we’ve got (I don’t know why he needs a street, since he already has a giant park, a mansion, a junior high, and a coffee shop). We’ve been fighting about his wife’s nature trail for three or four years now, and she was a Kennedy and universally beloved.
A smallish town near here had been known in jokes and folklore as a poster town for racism. This year, they had a ceremony on MLK day, their first.
My town has a section of a big diagonal street named for him, and there’s a minipark there with a bronze statue of Martin.
Street, square, schools and a park.
We have one in L.A.; I think it used to be called Santa Barbara Blvd. It did originally run pretty much through African American areas, but there are now probably many more Hispanics than Blacks in the neighborhoods through which it runs.
I don’t think anybody here really objected to it.
There’s a MLK Ave here in Knoxville (88.1% white). I don’t think it’s in a “bad” part of town… Laura and I went to hear Mozart’s Requiem at a church on the road. Then again, K’ville is such a quiet town that school fights make the evening news.
There’s an MLK in Albuquerque. There’s also a Cesar Chavez, an Unser, and lots of other weird names.
I live in Tacoma now, where many of the streets are letter names. I’m mildly amused that M.L. King St. lies just between J Street and M Street. It’s as if they chose the former K Street to rename King so as to cause the least confusion.
It was Chris Rock.
Anyway, there’s no street named after Martin Luther King where I live. There is a “Martin Luther King Family Outreach Center” though.
Don’t know how long you’ve lived in Baltimore, but the “Loft District” used to be a pretty marginal neighborhood, too (as is the case in many cities).
In all the US cities where I’ve lived, if there was a MKL Jr. Rd./Ave./Blvd., it followed true to Chris Rock’s observation, and I had always wondered why this was, as if poor black people were the only ones who appreciated the man? Perhaps it’s because they were the best neighborhoods for not getting some of the idiotic objections raised and mentioned/quoted here?
Wireless
Mid '80s SoBo resident
The Loft District is just west of the Inner Harbor, close to University Hospital, right? Considering it’s where the Sailcloth Factory, Inner Harbor Lofts, The Greenehouse and a few other upscale loft/apartment buildings are located, I’d say it’s a bit better than marginal. In fact, if my family consisted of just my husband and me, we’d live there in a heartbeat.
I wouldn’t want to live on the other side of MLK Blvd., though. ::shudder::
The MLK Boulevard near where I live is a new extension of an earlier road. It isn’t called MLK until after it crosses a highway, and I generally dislike it when a single road has different street names . Why they couldn’t have named the whole road after him, - I don’t know.
The MLK portion of it actually goes through a relatively new middle income suburban area, which does have a significant number of black residents, compared to other neighborhoods in my city - which overall is only 4-5% black. Another differece here is that black people here tend to be middle class or at least not the poorest of the poor, and there is no true “ghetto” that is mostly black. Our poor neighborhoods are mostly Mexican-American. I think its a shame that in many other places people automatically associate “MLK street” with declining property and crime. This particular story also displays how little conditions have improved (or perhaps gotten worse) since 1968.
Hi Juanita-
Things have changed a lot in that part of baltimore in the last 20 ( :eek: ) years.
I lived in Baltimore in the mid-80s, in what we jokingly called “SoBo”, playing on making South Baltimore hip (SoHo, SoBo, get it, HAR HAR HAR). It was just beginning to “gentrify” at the northern end. Others tried to call it Federal Hill, but truthfully, it wasn’t. It was a few blocks too far south of that (1400 block of Patapsco St., to be exact). To me it was a near-the-Inner-Harbor-but-affordable neighborhood. Totally blue collar. I, the (then) yuppie, was quite a curiosity.
The “loft district” (didn’t have a name then, IIRC) was basically derelict. Lots of empty buildings and surface parking lots. Some friends in from the suburbs and I got attacked by a rat one night walking to their car. I wouldn’t have walked it alone.
So, that’s why I said it was marginal.
Glad things have changed.
Wish I’d bought some of that real estate!
About time they started naming streets after Mae West!
I just wish more MLK Streets were in the good part of town. A man like him deserves better.