Along Martin Luther King: Travels on Black America's Main Street - Hardcover

Tilove, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 140006080X ISBN 13: 9781400060801

Publisher: Random House, 2003

Synopsis

Over the course of two years, Jonathan Tilove and freelance photographer Michael Falco traveled along some of the 650 Martin Luther King Jr. streets, avenues, and boulevards across the country--in Harlem; Belle Glade, Florida; Atlanta; Selma, Alabama; Jackson and Canton, Mississippi; Chicago; Oakland, California; Portland, Oregon; and nearly a score of cities and towns throughout Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.

As this journey reveals, life along King is at once tightly conjoined and kaleidoscopically diverse. And that is precisely what Tilove has lyrically portrayed in the writing of this book, and what Falco has so superbly illumined with his rich photographs of the people along Martin Luther King.

We meet Annie Williams, who lives and works on Belle Glade’s Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, managing the Sudsy City Laundromat, and who likes the idea that every black community she visits now has a main street with a common name; and Marion Tumbleweed Beach, a seventy-three-year-old teacher, writer, poet, reporter, editor, and activist who lives on Martin Luther King Street in Selma, Alabama, but finds the phenomenon a source of dismay: “I say they still get us with trinkets. We go cheap. I resent it.”

Tilove writes of the King streets: “Map them and you map a nation within a nation, a place where white America seldom goes and black America can be itself. It is a parallel universe with a different center of gravity and distinctive sensibilities, kinship at two or three degrees of separation, not six. There is no other street like it.”

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Tilove has written about race for Newhouse News Service since 1991. He is a three-time winner of the National Headliner Award and in 2001 was honored with a lifetime achievement award from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Workshops on Journalism, Race & Ethnicity. In 2003 he was the winner of the Freedom Forum/American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for Outstanding Writing on Diversity for the newspaper series on which this book is based.

Michael Falco is a freelance photographer based in New York City whose work has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, British Vogue, W, Harper’s Bazaar, and Garden Design. He is the winner of numerous Associated Press photo awards and was a finalist in the 2002 Gordon Parks Photography Competition for one of his Along Martin Luther King images. Michael is also a New York City–commissioned Public Artist.

From the Back Cover

But pause on King, begin talking to folks, and the clutter, the noise of the rest of America falls away, and you are transported beyond the sometimes battered facade into a black America that, with astonishing welcome, reveals itself as not only more separate and self-contained than imagined but also more tightly interconnected, more powerfully whole. Many black people have moved beyond the neighborhoods through which King runs (though there are now King streets in new black suburbs), but few live beyond the reach of the sounds, sentiments, and stories rooted on King. These are streets united by struggle and circumstance, by history and happenstance. One King street leads to the next and next and back again.

For many whites, a street sign that says Martin Luther King tells them they are lost. For many blacks, a street sign that says Martin Luther King tells them they are found.

—from Along Martin Luther King

From the Inside Flap

Over the course of two years, Jonathan Tilove and freelance photographer Michael Falco traveled along some of the 650 Martin Luther King Jr. streets, avenues, and boulevards across the country--in Harlem; Belle Glade, Florida; Atlanta; Selma, Alabama; Jackson and Canton, Mississippi; Chicago; Oakland, California; Portland, Oregon; and nearly a score of cities and towns throughout Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.<br><br>As this journey reveals, life along King is at once tightly conjoined and kaleidoscopically diverse. And that is precisely what Tilove has lyrically portrayed in the writing of this book, and what Falco has so superbly illumined with his rich photographs of the people along Martin Luther King.<br><br>We meet Annie Williams, who lives and works on Belle Glade’s Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, managing the Sudsy City Laundromat, and who likes the idea that every black community she visits now has a main street with a common name; and Marion Tumbleweed Beach, a seventy-three-year-old teacher, writer, poet, reporter, editor, and activist who lives on Martin Luther King Street in Selma, Alabama, but finds the phenomenon a source of dismay: “I say they still get us with trinkets. We go cheap. I resent it.”<br><br>Tilove writes of the King streets: “Map them and you map a nation within a nation, a place where white America seldom goes and black America can be itself. It is a parallel universe with a different center of gravity and distinctive sensibilities, kinship at two or three degrees of separation, not six. There is no other street like it.”

Reviews

Tilove, who covers race for Newhouse News Service, spent two years traveling across the U.S. locating and chronicling life along the streets, drives, boulevards, and avenues named for Martin Luther King Jr. Tilove and photographer Falco discovered nearly 500 streets named for the slain civil rights leader. Tilove met the residents and patrons of businesses along King in Harlem, Atlanta, Oakland, and Chicago, as well as smaller towns such as Canton, Mississippi; Belle Glade, Florida; and Huntsville and Jasper, Texas. The essays and photographs provide portraits of the lives and aspirations of black Americans along what is often the main street of the black community. The pair was in Belle Glade during the 2000 presidential election; in Chicago for the wake and funeral of poet Gwendolyn Brooks; in Harlem for King's birthday celebration; and in Portland, Oregon, to witness a slowly gentrifying community that has become less and less black over time. A riveting look at the concerns and conditions of black communities throughout the U.S. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

The Main Street

Every town got a Martin Luther King.

Annie Williams, Sudsy City Laundromat, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Belle Glade, Florida, 2000

There is a road that wends its way through the heart and soul of black America. It may be called a boulevard, a drive, an avenue, a street, or a way, but it is always named Martin Luther King.

It happened without grand design but with profound, if unrecognized, consequences. Together, the circumstance of segregation, the martyrdom that made Martin Luther King the every-hero of a people, and the countless separate struggles to honor him have combined to create a black Main Street from coast to coast.

Some six hundred and fifty streets are named for King in cities and towns from one end of the country to the other, with more added every year and no end in sight. Map them and you map a nation within a nation, a place where white America seldom goes and black America can be itself. It is a parallel universe with a different center of gravity and distinctive sensibilities, kinship at two or three degrees of separation, not six.

There is no other street like it.

Over the course of two years, a reporter and a photographer traveled along Martin Luther King streets of every size and description. Our only mission was to see where a journey along these streets of a single name would lead. We discovered that it leads everywhere—to every facet of black life, politics, thought, faith, culture, history, and experience—that in remarkable and uncanny ways it burrows deep into the marrow of that which is black America and into the enduring meaning of King’s life.

Along the way, there are barber and beauty shops, fast-food chicken franchises and slow-cooked barbecue joints with sweet iced tea and standing fans. There are the brilliantly colored murals paying homage to Martin, Malcolm, Rosa, Billie, Biggie, and Tupac. There are churches of every size, denomination, and shade of Jesus, more preachers than pulpits, black Muslims spanning the cosmological continuum, and in Galveston, Texas, a Korean War veteran scaling a four-foot fish in front of a gigantic turquoise Buddha he salvaged from a Mardi Gras parade.

There is, in both Harlem and Dallas, the intersection of MLK and Malcolm X; in Selma, the intersection of MLK and Jeff Davis; and in just about the middle of nowhere, East Texas, the corner of MLK and MLK. There are poets, players, writers, rappers, thinkers, tinkers, strutters, shouters, and with inspiring regularity, local heroes who, without pomp or portfolio, in one mortal guise or another, keep the spirit of King on King. And everywhere there is endless, ardent talk about what it means to be African in America.

Stretches of many King streets have a ragged, wasted quality to them. The comedian Chris Rock famously advised, “If a friend calls you on the telephone and says they’re lost on Martin Luther King Boulevard and they want to know what they should do, the best response is ‘Run!’ ” It has become a commonplace of popular culture to identify a Martin Luther King street as a generic marker of black space and, not incidentally, of ruin, as a sad and ironic signpost of danger, failure, and decline, and as a rueful rebuke of a people’s preoccupation with symbolic victories over actual progress.

But pause on King, begin talking to folks, and the clutter, the noise of the rest of America falls away, and you are transported beyond the sometimes battered facade into a black America that, with astonishing welcome, reveals itself as not only more separate and self-contained than imagined but also more tightly interconnected, more powerfully whole. Many black people have moved beyond the neighborhoods through which King runs (though there are now King streets in new black suburbs), but few live beyond the reach of the sounds, sentiments, and stories rooted on King. These are streets united by struggle and circumstance, by history and happenstance. One King street leads to the next and next and back again.

For many whites, a street sign that says Martin Luther King tells them they are lost. For many blacks, a street sign that says Martin Luther King tells them they are found.

When Dock Jackson—who played a role in naming the MLK in his hometown of Bastrop, Texas, where he is on the council, and in nearby Elgin, where he is the park director—arrived in Oklahoma City on business and needing a haircut, he simply headed to Martin Luther King and found Robert Gates’s barbershop. When Barber Gates travels to a new place, he does the same. “When I don’t know where I’m going, I’ll find MLK.”

Lives are lived from one King street to the next.

The Reverend Daniel Stafford, pastor of Peaceful Rest Baptist Church on Martin Luther King Boulevard in Jasper, Texas, is also pastor of Starlight Baptist Church on Martin Luther King Drive in De Ridder, Louisiana.

Dolores Cross was president of Chicago State University on King Drive before becoming president of Morris Brown College on Atlanta’s King Drive. She grew up in Newark, New Jersey, graduating from Central High School on what is now Martin Luther King Boulevard. When she returned to Newark after the publication of her book, Breaking Through the Wall: A Marathoner’s Story (published by Chicago State’s Haki Madhubuti’s Third World Press), she signed copies at St. James AME Church on MLK.

“It’s haunting,” says Cross.

The NFL linebacker Ray Lewis, who led the Baltimore Ravens to a 2000 conference championship playing on the MLK in Baltimore, was the most valuable player in the Super Bowl played on the MLK in Tampa, and spent the early preseason on trial at the Fulton County Courthouse on the MLK in Atlanta for murders committed in the hours following the previous Super Bowl. Throughout his trial (he ended up pleading guilty to obstruction of justice), his spiritual needs were tended to by the courtside presence of the Reverend J. Richard Harris, a minister we know from the MLK in Belle Glade, Florida.

On a late May day on the MLK in Portland, Oregon, the afternoon light streaming through an open door of a gospel festival at the Miracles Club illumines two little sisters playing with funeral home fans bearing the same sepia-warm image of Martin Luther King we saw on an identical fan eight months earlier in the hands of a laughing young woman sitting on a folding chair at a campaign rally on the MLK in Selma, Alabama. It was at that same rally that we met Martin Luther King III on Martin Luther King, and Emmanuel ben Avraham, the Trenton, New Jersey, community activist (raised Muslim, he later became a Baptist before converting to Orthodox Judaism) who led the effort to name the MLK there and in his native Newark, New Jersey.

On MLK Day 2000 in Belle Glade, Florida, we meet Angela Williams, just moved onto MLK there from Trenton, where she had lived near that city’s MLK. “Same damn street,” she says. “Think about it. Every Martin Luther King looks the same. The worst street in the city is named after Martin Luther King. Give a black man a black street in a black neighborhood? But that’s not the purpose. The purpose is to honor him. They should name Main Street Martin Luther King Boulevard.”

But Annie Williams (no relation), who lives and works on Belle Glade’s MLK, managing the Sudsy City Laundromat, disagrees. “Martin Luther King would not fit on Main because myself, being black, I would like it to run just like it’s running through a black town. Got to keep it black, got to keep this black, Martin Luther King got to be black,” she says.

It is a debate that can be heard from one MLK to the next, that echoes across America, because, as Annie Williams puts it, “Every town got a Martin Luther King.” Or so it seems.

In the decades since King’s assassination, the grassroots efforts to name streets for him have gained momentum in the face of substantial inertia and resistance. It is a movement with no national organization, no national attention, not even self-knowledge that a movement is what it is—as if the transcontinental railroad had been built piecemeal by folks unaware of one another. The only national leader is King, dead now nearly as many years as he lived but still uniquely able to inspire black unity and activism on his behalf.

Occasionally, King streets turn up in unexpected places. There are two MLKs in Utah, in gritty Ogden and a main thoroughfare leading into Salt Lake City, where to the arriving traveler, the Martin Luther King sign first leaps to view breathtakingly framed against the snowcapped Wasatch Mountains. There is a squib of a street in Newcomerstown, Ohio, a bucolic dot on the map midway between Columbus and Wheeling, West Virginia, that was home to Cy Young and Woody Hayes and, on its MLK, the descendants of some black workers brought in from Alabama early in the century to work in the local foundry. In 1969 they petitioned the village council to rename the street for King, and it was done.

Some Minnesotans were apparently so abashed on reading news stories in early 2002 about their state being one of the few without an MLK that by year’s end there were three—on the University of Minnesota campus in Morris; in St. Paul, where the state capitol is now on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and in Mankato, where they named a little street with nothing on it but a new National Guard armory for King. (Two days after Christmas an unidentified motorist mowed down both of Mankato’s new MLK street signs while shouting racial epithets at some passing children.) Beyond the borders of the United States, there is a Martin Luther King Boulevard in Dakar, Senegal, another MLK Boulevard in the Dutch city of Drachten, and in Tuscany, a Via Martin Luther King in the lovely little spa town of San Giuliano Terme, where Mary Wollstonecr...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 140006080X
• ISBN 13: 9781400060801
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240