Kudos to the Zephyrhills City Council for agreeing to name a major thoroughfare after slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Irene Dobson, who actually lives outside the city, used a 100-signature petition to persuade the City Council to rename Sixth Avenue, which is one block north of the city's main east-west street and stretches from First Street to Chancey Road.
Only Mayor Cliff McDuffie, who participates in debates but has no vote on the council, voiced objections Monday night. McDuffie, who also is executive director of the Zephyrhills Chamber of Commerce is off base here. A city cognizant of its race-related heritage - it was founded as a retirement colony for Union soldiers who had fought in the Civil War - should embrace the notion of honoring King.
Council member Clyde Bracknell said the city, instead, should rechristen a street after Dobson, saying she had done more for the Zephyrhills than King. We hope Bracknell was being facetious. If not, he, too, fails to grasp King's contributions. Without King's work to advance the civil rights cause for African-Americans, Dobson wouldn't have been empowered to lobby the city for a change.
The council would be wise to take note and perhaps even try to expand on east Pasco's annual day to remember King. It would be appropriate, particularly in a city where at least one council member acknowledged the impetus for the name change should have come sooner and should have originated at City Hall.
In Philadelphia, for instance, King's birthday in January is set aside as a Martin Luther King Day of service to promote cultural awareness, public service and community building. Next year, the ninth annual observance is expected to draw 35,000 volunteers to 600 projects in a six-county region.
Zephyrhills can't match those numbers, but the city could follow Dobson's lead. She has been honored by the chamber as a volunteer of the year, served as secretary at the Zephyrhills CARES center, headed the committee that plans the Martin Luther King Day observations in east Pasco and helps raise scholarship money for a deserving student.
Most notably, she successfully lobbied Zephyrhills to sponsor efforts to obtain federal community block grant dollars to pave streets and demolish ramshackle houses in the low-income Otis Moody neighborhood, just outside the city limits.
Dobson doesn't do this for a pat on the back. "I'll get my rewards in the end," she said Tuesday.
Indeed. She is living King's legacy through her community-building efforts. Others should follow her example.
