How Many Streets are Named After Martin Luther King? # Gets honored a lot. Theres no exact tally for how many streets are named after MLK, but there is a guy whos made it his job to figure out as exact an answer as possible. Derek Alderman is the geography department head at the University of Tennessee and hes become one of the leading experts on Martin Luther King streets, boulevards, and any other kind of roads. He says theres over 900 of them in 40 states as well as Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. But hell also tell you theres a sad irony in which streets get that name. Efforts to name streets after King in largely white areas has been met with enough pushback that most of the Martin Luther King streets out there are now located in predominantly black neighborhoods. Jonathan Tilove is a journalist who wrote a book about visits to 650 King streets across the country. He said, Map them and you map a nation within a nation, a place where white America seldom goes and black America can be itself, he wrote. It is a parallel universe with a different center of gravity and distinctive sensibilities. ... There is no other street like it. Which all means that the man who stood for desegregation has seen most of the streets named after him blocked off in a very segregated way.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 02:53:05 +0000
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