Where Do We Go From Here? The future of MLK streets, pt. 1

According to the MLK Streets Project, there are nearly 1,000 streets and avenues across 41 states named after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These corridors often bisect, connect or abut Black neighborhoods of past and present all over the country, and are often noted as visual indicators of "The Dream"--- a 'beloved community' globally, and a beloved community locally, a community in which Black people in the United States have achieved civic, social and economic justice.

Over the course of two pieces, I will discuss how we could think about the future community economic development of the streets that bear MLKs name and the neighborhoods they outline. I'll begin on #MLKDay by remembering a work of which contains some of his strongest economic commentary in order to capture his spirit. To close #MLKWeek2024, I'll propose some conceptual and tactical ideas to advance MLK streets and Black neighborhoods nationwide.

As I reflect on the legacy of the movement's work and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s work, I am reminded and examine of a passage of his "Where Do We Go From Here?" speech, which he delivered at the annual Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in August of 1967. Towards the denouement of the speech, in the native rhythm of a preacher, he begins his refrain of solicitation:

"...Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.

Let us be dissatisfied until those who live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security.

Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family will live in a decent, sanitary home..."

This speech was like a live performance of his studio album of ideas collected in his fourth and final book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? In the longer form, he explores and employs dichotomy as a rhetorical device to frame the political urgency of the mid-to-late 1960s, and proposes a Frostian choice both intra-communally and to White society.

In the excerpt above, King uses both ancient and modern imagery to draw together that wealth inequality is fundamentally a social problem fueled by human choices and flawed, human-led systems. He speaks of 'walls' and 'battering rams', implements of city defense and city siege in antiquity, and closes his economic parallels with the modern phrases 'metropolis' and 'slums'. I'm stirred by his evocation of both ancient cities and modern cities, and the throughline of socioeconomic duality throughout time.

It is no secret that King was Hegelian. Hegel's dialectical clearly manifests in chaos/community. In this passage, he illustrates his thesis with binary realities that he sorts into his larger categories of chaos or community. Chaos is, as MLK assigns, 'outskirts of hope', and 'slums'. Community then, looks like 'metropolises of daily security' and 'decent, sanitary homes'. He chooses to characterize the division that separates the city of wealth and comfort and inner cities of poverty as a 'wall' that needs to be broken with the 'battering ram of justice'. Again, it strikes me that he compares structural inequality to the fortification ancient and medieval cities, which does the work of reinforcing the intractability of inequality and criticizing inequality as archaic.

His thesis, that American individuals and society has a choice between chaos or [beloved] community, had a specific context to Vietnam, the 1968 U.S. presidential election and Black power movements and a panoramic context of human history. In the speech, and in the book, against the backdrop of Great Society programs, urban renewal and global conflict, he asserts an almost Roddenberry-esque idealism where societal scarcity has been abolished through better societal choices. Perhaps it was his Thurmanite intellectual heritage that propelled him to reach for an Eden-like state, but throughout the speech and the book, he too, questions the seemingly immutable social configuration of inequality. It's almost as if he questions whether or not "the poor will be with you always" is a catechism of humanity or a divine resignation on humanity's limitations.

It is a credit to MLK and debit to society that his sermons still feel prophetic. In an election year, multiple wars, the wind-down of America's 21st century racial reckoning, and landmark federal investment policies, it doesn't feel like America has made a hard choice between chaos and community. And yet, I resist neat choices of better or worse.

Throughout his dialogue, he maintains his moral appeal to this choice between chaos and community. It's a pastoral altar call in which there is no middle ground between a spiritual imperative. At the climax of "Where Do We Go From Here?" MLK quips,

"...America, you must be born again!"

Over fifty-five years later, through deindustrialization, mass incarceration and the onset of the New Great Migration, a consequential improvement of Black life may still require a structural economic rebirth and reparative reform for delayed action and nonaction. The persistence of the racial wealth gap and structural challenges to Black economic asset-building show that. Culturally, Black millennials and Gen Z, the largest current Black demographic in the country, having ushered the Black Lives Movement in the 2010s and being jaded in the early 2020s, are looking for reform, rebirth and dare I say --- renaissance. A renaissance, process that masters the former and adds the new, is what King describes in the middle of his speech:

"...What I’m saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both."

To repair, restore and revive our neighborhoods, our blocks, our streets, we'll need this 'higher synthesis', our renaissance, or in MLK's probable Baptist vernacular, "a new creature".

We'll need new ideas, leadership and tools that fill out the map, through the dead zones of chaos, to the beloved community, because that's where we are going next.

That's where we must go.

"...Yes, we need a chart; we need a compass; indeed, we need some North Star to guide us into a future shrouded with impenetrable uncertainties."

- elijah e. davis