The Oregonian:

The latest name change in Portland took petition circulating, gumshoe lobbying and political persuasion in Washington, D.C.

It involved three years and a chunk of two people’s lives.

What it did not involve was controversy.

On Wednesday, the Piedmont post office on Northeast Killingsworth Street will be dedicated in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The name switch started with a determined duo of letter carriers and ended with an act of Congress.

One of the determined carriers is white; the other is black. And the reason why their noble effort did not draw controversy is because America got over this sort of thing (naming public places after the civil rights superstar) two or so decades ago. How is this even a news story? In our age? There will be real improvement when we get rid of Black History Month. Black people do not need the burden of a whole month.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

21 replies on “The Americanization of MLK”

  1. > Black people do not need the burden of a whole month.

    Perhaps Charles, but it is the shortest and one of the coldest months.
    Maybe that counts as progress?

  2. Actually, wasn’t it in Oregon that one town re-named a big street after MLK but the next town over (the street continues into the next town) refused to follow suit? I’m looking on the Oregonian website for a link…..

    I’m not as sanguine as you are Charles—I think racism is alive and well.

  3. @2 – you must be thinking of some other town: MLK Blvd in Portland has pretty distinct beginning and end points within the city. On the north side the road ends at the I-5 bridge over the Columbia, and at the south end it combines with another road to become a third well north of the city line, just as it did when it was called Union Ave.

  6. what’s crazy is that even with MLK being a “civil rights superstar” people don’t even know MLK’s message, sure everyone knows the tag line, “I have a dream”, but Dr. King’s message was just as strongly against war and poverty as it was against racism. Dr. King’s fight is now simplified to his work in the Civil Rights movement, but that was really only a part of what he was working towards. Read his “Beyond Vietnam” speech for an example. And look at the mess we are in now.

  7. Black people do not need the burden of a whole month.

    Until the rest of America keeps on pretending that black history is not American history and keeps glorifying european ancestry at monuments like Rushmore while relegating
    all of it’s outstanding black citizens who had to overcome more than others and who have made many overlooked contributions to this nation, then Black Americans need to take on gladly the responsibility (which you call burden) of making sure that future generations do not forget their greatness.

  8. Since when is it a burden to educate the public on what is still mostly still unknown history? But if you don’t want the designation, please have Congress transfer it to we LGBTs (some of whom are black – sorry, you can’t help keep people ignorant of ALL blacks in history, just the heterosexual ones). Heaven knows we could use the spotlight to get schools and the media to educate the public on who LGBT people really are and what we’ve contributed through history.

    It’s great that these two letter carriers had no problem changing the PO name, but Portland is a liberal hot spot like Seattle. Just try doing that in an outer county and the story wouldn’t be so rosy.

    Racism is alive and well in America. It would be more worthwhile to address the real issues rather than pretend they don’t exist.

  9. @5: Or, it might be news if there were any facts, information or anything other than conjecture. Or it may just be that the people of the hypothetical “next town over” have decided not to name a street after someone. Does every municipality have to have a MLK dedicated road or structure?

  10. I’m confused. We’re not allowed to shoot for a colorblind society that doesn’t address race, and now we’re also not allowed to celebrate the achievements of minority Americans? I’d like to know Charles’s vision of a properly integrated future.

  12. Congress has time to spend renaming a street after a black civil rights leader but it doesn’t take the time to work on repeal of DADT? Really? They’re too busy working on one civil rights issue to take notice of another?

    Why is black history any more American than LGBT history? Another reason HRC needs to do it’s job.

  13. @12 Yes HRC needs to do its job, but playing oppression Olympics won’t help the situation. At all. And btw, Congress doesn’t work on just one item at a time.

  14. @12″Why is black history any more American than LGBT history?”

    For starters gays were never literally enslaved. Also not to diminish the pain of gay bashing and murders of LGBT people but it does not compare at all to lychings and Jim Crow laws. I think the biggest part is that historically not many people cared about gays and even now many gay people can’t be identified right away like a black person can be.

    I am all for helping racial and sexual minorities but please don’t compare the two issues too much. They are related but oh so different.

  16. Lest anyone think this post a serious comment about America, I direct your attention to this story from Louisville in 2007:

    In a nation with nearly 800 streets name…

    And that’s from a place that had direct ties with him. I-65 in Jefferson County the “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Expressway” but that’s just because it could be done at the state level

    When they renamed a street for Muhammad Ali — who from Louisville — at least one business owner who opposed it remodelled his building so it opened to the other side so that his address didn’t have a black name.

  17. 2, 5, and 9:

    It did happen. In Eugene and Springfield. Sometime in the last 10 years, Eugene changed the name of Centennial Blvd, which goes by UO’s football stadium. East of I-5, across the city line in Springfield, the street is still known as Centennial Blvd.

    It was news. When it happened. It allowed everyone on both sides of the debate to reinforce their stereotyped prejudices about people on the other side. And then it faded.

  20. Okay, rewind, that was NOT meant as I now see that it sounds. That was not what was in my head as the words were typed. Thus the question to LC “They’re too busy working on one civil rights issue to take notice of another”?

    My antagonism is solely directed at one individual alone and refers to comments in the DADT thread as well as many, many previous posts. My apologies for how this sounded but my intent was clear to me.

    I fully expect to be shredded before I can get back to this post in several hours. Note to self, do not post when in a hurry.

    In the words of MLK A right delayed is a right denied. That was what was going through my head as I typed the previous comment.

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