NAACP wants King Avenue moved

The three-block stretch currently named for the slain civil rights leader is not an appropriate legacy, some say.

By CHRISTINA HEADRICK

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 29, 2001

CLEARWATER -- Standing in front of his home Tuesday, with sweat dripping off his face in the 94-degree heat, Cliff Mills didn't mince words about the street sign on the corner.

The sign designates a three-block stretch of road as Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue. Mills pointed to cracks in the sidewalks and a city sewage treatment plant at the end of the street.

"If King is going to have a road named after him, it should be more significant. It should traverse different areas of the city, different boundaries," he said. "Was this to honor King or appease a community?"

Such views have been around for years in North Greenwood, the neighborhood in which Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue lies. Mills remembers his late mother complaining that the street naming was "typical."

Members of the NAACP Clearwater/Upper Pinellas County Branch felt the same way. In July, the branch asked the city to name a more prominent, cross-town road for the slain civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

"I know and I feel it has a great deal to do with what Martin Luther King did for the American people and for all of us," said Arthonia Godwin, who owns an upholstery business and is president of the local NAACP branch.

"It would have an importance for years from now," Godwin said. "Many of the young people have heard very little about Martin Luther King. You hear less and less."

Clearwater officials have yet to respond. The request was received July 9.

City Manager Bill Horne said he understands that this is an issue that runs deeper than just erecting new street signs. Horne, the city's first African-American city manager, seems to be approaching the topic cautiously.

"I've got the staff doing a pros-and-cons analysis of naming streets or co-naming streets," said Horne, who displays a picture of King in his office. "But it's not ready for me to bring this issue to the commission yet.

"I don't want this to be a polarizing issue."

One of the streets the NAACP's branch has suggested as a candidate for renaming is N Greenwood Avenue, a north-south corridor that runs through the business district of the city's historically African-American North Greenwood neighborhood.

The other road nominated by the NAACP is Drew Street, a busy east-west route clustered with small businesses in some stretches and old, wooden homes in others. Drew runs from Old Tampa Bay to Clearwater Harbor.

"I'd prefer to see Drew, but I could live with Greenwood," Godwin said.

City engineers are looking at how many businesses and homeowners might be affected on the streets, how much the change might cost and any other possible ramifications, Horne said.

Many other Tampa Bay cities have named major streets for King, although sometimes only after years of angry debate and charges of bigotry. In Dade City, a handful of Ku Klux Klan members protested.

St. Petersburg added "M.L. King Jr." to the name of Ninth Street, a major north-south route, in 1987. Tampa tackled the issue in 1989, designating Buffalo Avenue as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. At first, business owners were able to use either address, then Buffalo was eventually dropped. Tarpon Springs and Safety Harbor did it, too.

Nationwide, there were nearly 500 streets as of 1996 named for King, according to Derek Alderman, an assistant professor of cultural geography at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. There were also 110 public schools named after King as of 1998.

"Clearly on one level, it's about honoring a great person and a civil rights leader," he said. "On another level, it's about African Americans as a previously discriminated-against social group reclaiming the country symbolically -- trying to create some space for their memory within the national consciousness."

Talmadge Rutledge, a former head of the North Greenwood Association, was among those residents who pushed for the original street naming in the late 1980s, when King streets were being named all over the country.

Rutledge said he thought Clearwater would designate other parts of Douglas Avenue for King -- not just the three-block stretch that was renamed.

But it never happened.

"I think it's pitiful," Rutledge said. King, he said, "emphasized doing things non-violently. He took a lot of abuse, physical abuse. He gave his life. I think Clearwater should have more than a 500-foot stretch of road named for him."

- Times staff writer Deborah O'Neil and Times news researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report.

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