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

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 everywhereto every facet of black life, politics, thought, faith, culture, history, and experiencethat 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 reaTilove, Jonathan is the author of 'Along Martin Luther King Travels on Black America's Main Street', published 2003 under ISBN 9781400060801 and ISBN 140006080X.