Jonathan Tilove, Newhouse News Service, Washington
Posted 7/30/2003 12:00:00 AM

Martin Luther King Streets Map a Nation Within a Nation

Chicagoand Jackson, Miss.: Heart and Soul

FiguringOut What It Meansto Be Black in America

StillStraining to Hear That Late Word of Freedom

What’sUp, and What’s Coming Up

Martin Luther King Streets Map a Nation Within a Nation

Jan. 1, 2002

By Jonathan Tilove
Newhouse News Service

There is a road that wends its way through the heart and soul of black America. Sometimes it is 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 Jr. 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.

Better than 500 streets are named for King in cities and towns from one end of the country to the other, with more added every year. 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.

The idea for a journey along Martin Luther King was born some years ago on a reporting trip through the Mississippi Delta. In town after town, directions to the black community had the sameness of a blues refrain: Just head on down to Martin Luther King.

Over the course of twoyears, a reporter and a photographer have done just that — headed on downto 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. And we discovered that they lead to every facet of black life, politics, thought, belief, culture, history and experience.

We journeyed along King in Jackson, Miss., and on the south side of Chicago, the respective prime source and major destination of the great black migration north. We traveled King in Selma, Ala., and Atlanta, each in its way a mecca of the black freedom struggle.

We started one trip onJuneteenth in Galveston — where that celebration began, marking the day when, 21/2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, word finally reached slaves in Texas that they were free. We zigzagged halfway to Canada through East Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas — 19King streets in all, encountering black communities that one to anotherwere still struggling to make good on that late word of freedom.

We journeyed to the rough-hewnMartin Luther King Boulevard amid the lush land and lean times of littleBelle Glade, Fla., and to the most showy andcelebrated Martin Luther King Boulevard of them all — 125th Streetin Harlem.

And in two West Coastoutposts of the African-American diaspora — Oakland, Calif., and Portland, Ore. — ourtales of our travels were welcomed like news from home.

Stretches of many Kingstreets have a ragged, wasted quality to them. Comedian Chris Rock famouslyadvised, “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!”’

But pause on King, begintalking to folks, and you are transported beyond the sometimes batteredfacadeinto a black America that, with astonishingwelcome, reveals itself. It’s not only more separate and self-containedthan imagined, but more tightly interconnected, more powerfully whole.

This black America isnot hidden. But as the Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston wrotein 1950,in a piece titled “What White Publishers Won’t Print”: “Forvarious reasons, the average, struggling, non-morbid Negro is the best-keptsecret in America. ... His revelation to the public is the thing neededto do away with that feeling of difference which inspires fear, andwhich everexpresses itself in dislike.”

And so we journeyed.

From the sultry rush of freshman week at Morris Brown College in Atlanta to the snow-wrapped funeral of the Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks.

From the ecstatic trombone shout music at the United House of Prayer for All People in Harlem to the furious throb of the Bay Area rappers RBL Posse, whom we encountered in Portland.

From the country-quietMLK in Jasper, Texas — on which James Byrd Jr. was walking when he climbed into a pickup truck, to be dragged to his death — tothe prison on MLK in Oklahoma City where Wanda Jean Allen lived until,the week before King Day 2001, she became the first black woman executedin halfa century.

Everywhere 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 brilliant colors of murals paying homage to King and other heroes. There are churches beyond counting. And there is endless, ardent talk about what it means to be African in America.

A very few big Kingstreets — beginning with Chicago and Atlanta — were dedicated within months of King’s assassination. In the nearly 35 years since, the grass-roots efforts to name streets for King have gained momentum in the face of substantial inertia and resistance. It is a movement with no national organization, no national attention, not even self-knowledge that a movement is what it is — asif the transcontinental railroad had been built piecemeal by folksunaware of one another.

These are streets united by struggle and circumstance, by history and happenstance. One leads to the next and next and back again.

Many black people have moved beyond the neighborhoods where King runs (though there are now King streets in new black suburbs), but few live beyond the reach of the sounds, sentiments and stories rooted on King.
And for many, a street sign that says Martin Luther King heralds a home away from home.

When Dock Jackson, thepark director in Elgin, Texas, arrived in Oklahoma City in need of a haircut,he simplyheaded down to Martin Luther King andfound Robert Gates’ barbershop. When Gates travels to a new place, he does the same. “When I don’t know where I’m going,” he says, “I’llfind MLK.”

The more communitiesthat have one, the more a black community without one wonders why not.This oftenmeans a rousing fight, right up to last year’s naming of a street for King in Waukegan, Ill., and the failed campaigns to do the same in Toledo, Ohio, and High Point, N.C. In 1987, voters in San Diego rescinded the naming of their city’sMLK, and polls indicated that voters in Portland, Ore., would havedone the same in 1990 had the courts not intervened.
Businesses don’t like the bother. There are always some folks devotedto the history and significance of the old name. But in the hundredsof battlesone also catches a glimpse of deeper white resistance and of the realKing, the man with edge and meaning and not simply the dreamy Kingof grammarschool coloring contests.

The biggest sticking point in these debates is usually whether the street named for King extends beyond the black community.

In Belle Glade, HarmaMiller, who was on the city council at the time, said whites wanted theMLK toend before it reached their “beloved Elks Club.” “I said, ‘No,’ and made a big fuss about it,” andthe whole of Avenue E now also bears the name Martin Luther King.

But when they did some street repairs in 1999 and replaced a few signs, Miller said, the print on the MLK signs was shrunk so small you had to stop and squint to make it out. That fall, when she became the first black mayor with a black majority on the council, the first thing she did was replace those signs.

Dock Jackson tells usthat Elgin lagged 13 years behind the neighboring Texas cities of Bastropand Smithville — dedicating its MLK on Juneteenth 2001 — because proponents wanted both the white and black ends of the street to bear King’sname. Finally, he said, they settled for the black half alone.

It might have been thesame story back in 1975 in Austin — just west of Elgin — were it not for J.J. Seabrook, an elder statesman of the black community, who suffered a fatal heart attack while imploring the city council not to treat King like that. He died and won. Austin’sMLK crosses racial lines and borders the state Capitol complex.

The dedication on KingDay 1993 of a Martin Luther King Boulevard in Americus, Ga., came aftera yearof ugly arguments, threats, protests and the memorablesuggestion by a deputy fire chief that half the street be named forKing and the other half for James Earl Ray, King’s convicted assassin.

Occasionally, King streetsturn up in unexpected places: a busy thoroughfare in Salt Lake City, asquibof a street in Newcomerstown, Ohio — a bucolic dot on the map midway between Columbus and Wheeling, W.Va., that was home to Cy Young and Woody Hayes. Sometimes there isn’tone where you might expect it, like Philadelphia.
But for the most part, King streets are exactly where you would lookfor them: the densest swaths in the Deep South, from East Texas toFlorida. Mississippi alone has at least 65, and King’s home state ofGeorgia has the most, with upwards of 70.

At times the journey along King is like a pilgrimage along the stations of the cross for the martyred hero.

In 1958, Martin Luther King was stabbed while signing books on what is now MLK in Harlem. He led the 1965 marches in Selma beginning from Brown Chapel on what is now MLK there. Days before his own death, Malcolm X came to that same church to express his solidarity with King, who was then in a Selma jail.

Martin Luther King wastear-gassed in 1966 on what is now the MLK in Canton, Miss., on the Memphis-to-Jacksonmarch along which Stokely Carmichael, tear-gassedas well, first roused a crowd to chant “Black Power.”

The mule-drawn caissoncarrying King’s casket in 1968 rolled along whatis now MLK in his hometown of Atlanta as it passed the Morris Brown campus,coming within shouting distance of the modest home where King lived and hiswidow still does.

And for many years, OlivetBaptist Church on King Drive in Chicago took its address from its sidestreet becausethe pastor, now dead, was such abitter rival of King’s in national black Baptist circles.

At times, we come upon the wholly unexpected on King.

Just a block south of Olivet Baptist in Chicago is the stately Griffin Funeral Home, where they buried Jesse Owens and Elijah Muhammad and where, each morning, they raise to half-staff a Confederate flag. It is a practice begun by the late owner, Ernest Griffin, when he learned that his mortuary stood on the site of Fort Douglas, a prisoner-of-war camp where more than 6,000 Confederate soldiers died, and where his own grandfather enlisted in the U.S.
Colored Infantry during the Civil War.

On every new King we visit, we learn more about the last King we left, new threads in the tapestry.

Gwendolyn Brooks is wakedat the same Chicago funeral home where they waked the hideously bruisedand bloatedbody of the teen-age Emmett Till, killedwhile visiting Mississippi in the summer of 1955. In Jackson, we meet CharlesTisdale, who was a reporter for the Chicago Defender at the trial of thetwo white men acquitted of Till’s murder.

And on the MLK in Oakland,we meet Lillie Luckett, who saw the famous photo of the murdered Till inJetmagazine and said, “That family always had trouble.” Growing up in Mississippi, Luckett picked cotton on the land that Till’sgrandfather oversaw in the Delta.

Every step of the way, King streets are not just our destination but our guide.

We go to Oklahoma Cityto visit the well-kept women’s prison where convictedmurderer Wanda Jean Allen had been on death row.

But no sooner have wearrived than we stumble into the Miss Black Oklahoma pageant being heldat a tumbledownhotel a few miles down King. The pageantis under the indomitable leadership of 78-year-old Clara Luper, who in 1957took a group of black youngsters to Harlem to perform her play, “Brother President: The Story of Martin Luther King,” anexperience that began the Oklahoma City sit-ins the following year.

We go to Lanier HighSchool on MLK in Jackson to see Robert Moses, who commutes every week fromBostonto teach, part of the national Algebra Project, whichhe created to free black young people from the modern serfdom of math illiteracy.We also meet his assistant, Jolivette Anderson, “the poet warrior.”

More than a year and a half later we are with Anderson in Harlem as she performs at the annual Show and Prove of the Five Percent Nation, a group that, teaching that each black man is God, is influential in the worlds of hip-hop and prisons.

That same weekend, on a radiant June day by the beach in Coney Island, Anderson performs at a numinous ceremony of remembrance of the black lives lost in the Middle Passage from African freedom to American bondage.

Lives are lived from one King to the next.

Almost every year, CharlesBolden, a truck driver in Oregon, drives his 1993 Mustang the 3,000 milesfromthe MLK in Portland to the MLK in Harlem — 10 hours a stint, 31/2 days, 12 tanks of gas. On his arrival, he parks the Mustang at his sister’s house in Brooklyn, and then it’s into Harlem to hear “the drums” ofblack consciousness, which he says sound too faintly in his adopted hometown.

Shawna Holbrook, who owned the now-defunct Indigo Shack, an African arts shop on MLK Way in Oakland, used to spend summers with her grandma, who lives just off the MLK in Jackson.

The Rev. Daniel Stafford, pastor of Peaceful Rest Baptist Church on Martin Luther King Boulevard in Jasper, is also pastor of Starlight Baptist Church on Martin Luther King Drive in DeRidder, La.

Dolores Cross was presidentof Chicago State on King Drive before becoming president of Morris BrownonAtlanta’s King Drive. She grew up in Newark,N.J., graduating from Central High School on what is now Martin Luther KingBoulevard.

“It’s haunting,” Crosssays.

NFL linebacker Ray Lewisled the Baltimore Ravens to a 2000 conference championship playing on theMLK inBaltimore, was the most valuable player in the SuperBowl played on the MLK in Tampa, Fla., and spent the early preseason on trialon Atlanta’s MLK for murders committed in the hours following the previousSuperbowl. (He pleaded guilty to obstructing justice.)

Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin,formerly known as H. Rap Brown, was arraigned in the same Atlanta courthouseonKing, charged with the murder of a sheriff’sdeputy who went to Morris Brown.

When Al-Amin was captured in the Alabama countryside to which he had fled, he called the legendary attorney J.L. Chestnut, who on our Sunday in Selma presided over First Baptist Church on MLK, and whose law office is on Jeff Davis not far from its intersection with MLK.

A few blocks up King from First Baptist is the home of Marion Tumbleweed Beach, the gloriously cantankerous old woman with the beautiful garden, the black liberation flag and the lawn sign for Joe Smitherman, the white mayor defeated by James Perkins Jr., his black challenger. Beach knows Al-Amin as well. Back in 1990 he spoke at the funeral of her daughter, Carolyn Delores Beach Foucher, a former Black Panther in Chicago.

On Selma’s King, we alsomeet Emmanuel ben Avraham, the Trenton, N.J., community activist (likemanyothers, in town to help Perkins) who led the effort toname the MLK there and in his native Newark, N.J.

Earlier, on a visit toBelle Glade for King Day 2000, we had met Angela Williams, just moved ontoMLK therefrom Trenton, where she had lived nearthat city’s MLK. “Same damn street,” she says with an ain’t-it-a-shame scowl.
“Give a black man a black street in a black neighborhood?” she asks. “That’snot the purpose. The purpose is to honor him.”

But Annie Williams (norelation), who lives and works on Belle Glade’s MLK, managing the Sudsy City Laundromat, disagrees. “Got to keep it black, got to keep this black, Martin Luther King got to be black,” shesays.

That’s the way it is and ought to be, in her view, and not just in Belle Glade but in all the other places with MLKs — and that, she knows, is a lot of places, because every place she goes, she looks. “Every town,” she says, “gota Martin Luther King.”

More than she knows,she’s right.

Chicago and Jackson, Miss.: Heart and Soul

Jan. 1, 2002

By Jonathan Tilove
Newhouse News Service

The Martin Luther King drives in Jackson, Miss., and Chicago are about as different as any two King streets in America.

InJackson, it’s a big old country road, one that meanders a bit and doesn’t seem to accomplish a lot, at least in terms of getting you anywhere other than where you already are. You drive by the Drummer house just once after being gone a year and a half, and when you finally get around to dropping by, Beola Drummer says, “Isaw you were in town.”

King Drive in Chicago iscolder in every way. It’s a big, broad, bricks-and-mortarstraight shot as far as the eye can see. Stretches are grand. Patches areworn. But if it angled just a hair west and kept on for another 749 miles,it would run right into King Drive in Jackson.

And then the truth wouldbecome apparent: The two streets are connected by everything but tar andmacadam,connected like before is to after, “what about” is to “you don’t say,” motherlandis to colony and soul is to everlasting soul.

“We are not a tribe, we are a nation. We are not wandering groups, we are a people,” theChicago poet Haki Madhubuti, who teaches on King, wrote 30 years ago.

If Madhubuti’s nation has a heart — a throbbing, vital center for its politics and pulse — it is Chicago, the chosen home of Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan, of Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, of Ebony and Jet. It is the poet Gwendolyn Brooks’ “IWill city ... ripe/roused/ready.”

And the soul of black folks has got to be somewhere in Mississippi. It has the highest percentage of black people in the United States. Black life and culture everywhere in America are rooted in the South, and this is where the roots run deepest.

“I’m used to hard times,” says W.L. Stokes, a man with a face of abiding eloquence, who grew up picking cotton “from can to can’t, from can see to can’t see,” and now spends his days trading stories with the old-timers at Brown’s gas station on Jackson’sKing.

These men, however, livedtheir lives along the arc from can’t to can. They came of age at a time when “nothing and nothing could stop Mississippi,” asBrooks put it in a poem about the death of Emmett Till, the 14-year-oldChicago boy who was visiting his uncle in Money, Miss., when he supposedlywhistled at a white woman and ended up shot and drowned.

Stokes served in the segregatedmilitary. Johnny Mack Brown was a Pullman porter when that was about thebest job a black man could have. WardellCatchings fled the Watts riots figuring, “If I got to fight, I’d rather be home.” The very day he returned to Mississippi he became one of the first two black men hired to drive a Jackson city bus. Quincy Brown, proprietor of Brown’sHighway Service, marched for freedom.

They saw it all, survived it all, somehow intact, strong and sweet.
They play checkers at Brown’s on a well-worn red-and-white board.
“I wouldn’t do that if I was you,” Stokes, cigar clenched in his mouth, warnsCatchings, who is gently sliding his piece along.

“I didn’t see that,” saysCatchings.

“You saw it,” Stokes replies, raising and slamming his piece — snap, snap, snap, snap — a quadruple jump. “You’re just playing the wrong person. You know who I am, don’tyou?”

Charles Tisdale, ownerand editor of the Jackson Advocate, now in his 70s, knows everybody. Hiscareer in blacknewspapers took him from Chicagoto Memphis, Tenn., to Jackson — which, the way he makes it out, is like tumbling down a flight of stairs. “Mississippi goddamn,” Tisdale says in his sonorous rumble, quoting singer Nina Simone. “Whydid I come here? I am confused. Anybody who could escape should do so.”

Tisdale is not confused.He is ornery, his newspaper’s office a frequent target of attacks over the years. “If they hadn’ttried to run me off, I probably would have left.”

High up along an elegantexpanse of King Drive in a part of Chicago’s South Side known as Bronzeville is a beautiful statue dedicated to the great northern migration of black folks from the South. It’sof a man both sad and jaunty, his back to Mississippi, arriving with asatchel tied with string, wearing a suit made up of shoe soles.

“When I got off at the train station, I saw all the lights and things, it was like entering paradise,” saysRose Marie Black, who arrived in 1946 at age 12 from Summit, Miss.

Black is a vision in blackand white — thigh-high boots, skirt up to here, hat out to there, all made by her own hand. When we first encounter her, we are driving south on King Drive and she is about to board a northbound bus. She must be used to the sound of screeching brakes, the swiveling salute of turned heads. She is Racetrack Rosie, the Bronze Temptress — at 66, Chicago’soldest stripper.

(‘‘The one with the hat out to there?” asks Jack Bennett back at Brown’sin Jackson. After playing Negro League ball, he spent the shank of hislife working for the post office in Chicago before coming home to Mississippi.)

Black’s longtime boyfriend, Aaron “Stoney Burke” Johnson,is a Democratic precinct captain. On Election Day 2000, he was the dapperimpresario greetingthe faithful outside a polling place near King, an old church that looksmore Mississippi than Chicago. (Johnson is the superintendent of transportationfor the Chicago Post Office, and Jack Bennett knows him, too.)

When Johnson deliveredhis precinct’s tallies to Congressman Bobby Rush’soffice on King, Al Gore beat George W. Bush, 352 to 10.

It is poetic justice, Chicago-style,that Gwendolyn Brooks’ very last public act — the last time she left her home before she died — was to vote in 2000. And, says Haki Madhubuti, “she didn’tgo out to vote for Bush.”

Madhubuti is a professor at Chicago State University, a mostly black public college on King Drive. He saw to the creation of a Gwendolyn Brooks Center there with an annual writers conference, a hall of fame for writers of African descent and a professorship for Brooks.

“What does a son do for a mother?” asksMadhubuti, who says Brooks saved and softened him.
Madhubuti is also the founder of two Afrocentric schools — a public charter school and a private school — andof Third World Press, begun in a basement apartment and now occupying aformer Catholic rectory with the quiet and class of some well-appointedIvy League foundation.

He is a prolific and popularpoet and essayist, “an interpreter and protector of Blackness,” in Brooks’ words, emerging, when he was known as Don Lee, as one of the sharpest figures of the black arts movement of the 1960s. His 1990 book, “Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous?” hasremained a best seller in black bookstores.

“He was into that black stuff and he was as light-skinned as a piece of golden corn on the cob,” he wrote of himself 15 years ago. So light-skinned that, in 1974, he decided to take a name as black as his consciousness — Haki, which in Swahili means “just,” and Madhubuti, “precise” or “accurate.”

In the years since, Madhubutihas become as profoundly influential in black America as he is invisibleto whiteAmerica. He is polite, reservedand deeply secure. He has presence — or, as we find traveling on King,omnipresence.

In 1989, when students occupied the administration building at Morris Brown College on MLK in Atlanta, they called Madhubuti for advice.

In 1995, Madhubuti brokered a peace between Louis Farrakhan and Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, that was publicly sealed at the Apollo Theater on MLK in Harlem. It was broadcast to a closed-circuit audience around the world.

A month after the 2000 election, Brooks died, Madhubuti by her side. She was buried in snowbound Chicago after a wake at Rayner and Sons Funeral Home on East 71st Street, a block and a half off King.

Rayner’s most famous wakewas in the summer of 1955 for Emmett Till. His grotesquely mutilated bodywas shippedback to Chicago, and his motherdecided to leave the casket open for the world to see. Over three days,thousands filed by.

Jackson’s Charles Tisdale, then with the Chicago Defender, was in Mississippi for the trial of the two white men who were ultimately acquitted. “We stood under under a tree because they wouldn’t let us in the courtroom at that time. Every morning the sheriff would come by and say, I think in his most benevolent tone, ‘Good morning, niggers.”’

The Malcolm X Center inJackson, a small, dark fortress of a building next to Lanier High Schoolon King,was begun 10 years ago in the wakeof protests over the police killing of a black man trying to clean drugsout of a local housing project. “We didn’t choose the street because it was Martin Luther King, but we’re happy that it was Martin Luther King,” saysChokwe Lumumba, the revolutionary nationalist attorney who founded thecenter.

Lumumba arrived in the early 1970s as part of the Republic of New Afrika, a movement to create a black nation out of five Southern states, beginning here.

Later, after sojourns inhis native Detroit, Chicago and New York, Lumumba returned to Jackson in1988. Mississippiis the blackest place, he says,the place he is most at home and most challenged: “It is the center ofthe problem. If you can crack the nut here, you have done it.”

The Malcolm X Center isa place for classes and lectures, for summer camp, for the New Afrikan Scouts — anational group whose first president was the late rapper Tupac Shakur, whomLumumba represented in one scrape afteranother, most famously at a preliminary hearing at the courthouse on MLKin Atlanta when Shakur was charged with shooting two off-duty Atlanta policeofficers. The charges later were dropped.

The Malcolm X Center is also home to the Jackson Panthers, the very successful basketball team. And every spring, Lumumba runs a Black History Classic tournament for teams from throughout the South.

“I’ve reclaimed my interest in sports since I’ve been down here,” he says. “Back in the ‘70s, I wouldn’thave been bouncing no basketball. I would have been at the rifle range.”

In the wake of Sept. 11, Lumumba, as head of the New Afrikan Peoples Organization, expressed his sympathy with the victims, but suggested that America must also be held accountable for its history of terrorism, at home and abroad, a view he says resonates in the barbershop talk of black America.

“The only thing that’s changed is that for the first time in my life I’ve seen fear in the eyes of white folks,” Haki Madhubuti says of the impact of Sept. 11. “For black folks, nothing’schanged.”

Lu Palmer concurs: “I don’tthinkof anything that might be different.”

Palmer is revered in blackChicago — forhis writing, his newspaper columns, his radio show, his willingness to quitor be fired whenever one of hisvarious employers over the years tried to shut him up for being too outspokenlyblack.

Palmer made a career ofsmiting white folks with his words. He was the “Panther with a pen.” Buthe is an old man now, 78, and barely able to see.

He lives with his ailingwife, Jorja, in a 40-room castle where Chicago’s King Drive intersects with a street named for himself. The castle — turrets, howling wind and all — isbroken up into apartments, but renting them is a losing game.

For almost 12 years, Palmerhad his own radio show — “Lu’s Notebook,” a five-minute commentary sponsored by Illinois Bell on all four black radio stations in Chicago. It was in the basement of his castle that Palmer and a handful of others persuaded the reluctant Harold Washington to make the run that led to his election in 1983 as Chicago’s first black mayor. The same morning that Washington announced for mayor, Illinois Bell canceled “Lu’sNotebook.”

“They said, ‘You have been too outspoken in pushing Harold Washington,”’ Palmer recalls. “Sothey fired me.”
From 1983 until his retirement in January 2001, he did talk radio. He rang in the 2000 election results denouncing both Bush and Gore.

There is something bothheroic and forlorn about Palmer, devoting himself so wholly to his people.He consideredhimself a disciple of Martin LutherKing Jr. in King’s lifetime, but now believes King was wrong about two things — nonviolenceand integration.

Palmer is campaigning toget black schools to quit having proms at white-owned hotels, but says, “Thesekids and their parents would rather die before they would hold a prom intheirown gym.”

Chokwe Lumumba’s Black History Classic and Jackson’s Lanier High School prom — being held at the Crowne Plaza downtown — arethe same weekend in April 2001.

While the prom is all black, the tournament has a few white players. There are white Panthers.
“We’re nationalists, not separatists,” says Lumumba, who embroiders a littleblack nationalism into a pep talk mostly intended to encourage the playersto stay on top of their academics.

At Beola Drummer’s housejust up King from the high school, her daughter, Jessica, is getting readyfor theprom.
A piece of paper taped on the front door says, “No Public Restrooms. Don’teven Ask!!!!!!!”

It’s a joke of sorts. Peopleare constantly in and out of the house, children dropped off and picked up.Onour last visit, a woman sat on the porchenjoying a long drink of iced tea. When she left, we asked who she was.Drummer just shrugged.

When Drummer won big at bingo, she bought two large plastic swimming pools for the neighborhood kids to splash in. She provides a running commentary on life. She strips a tree branch and offers a lecture on the glory of switches. She has four children, three of whom have already graduated from Lanier.

Jessica — nicknamed Jessy — is in her room primping. The sign on her door says: “Keep out! Aja & Jessy only. Keep My Door Closed, my TV off. Do Not Sit on My Pillows (if I let you in). If I ain’t here you shouldn’t be here neither. RESPECT my property as you would yo’ mammy!”

Aja is Jessica’s baby daughter. Jessica’s sister, Melissa, has a baby with W.L. Stokes’ great-grandson, who is away at medical school. The baby’sgrandfather, Kenneth, is the city councilor responsible for getting thisstreet named for King, and for the King Day parade that ends as it passesthe Drummer front porch.

As she irons Jessica’s powder-blue satin prom dress, Drummer is going on about “the laziest dog in the world,” the one that put its paws over its eyes to avoid the light, that had to be dragged on its walks, that would give you this look like, “ifyou want that damn stick you better get it yourself.”

“This dog was lazy!”

Outside, Mississippi is spread wide against the night but inside, the house is tiny, cramped and worn. The Drummers are poor, and fortunate. Here, in the soul of black America, Beola Drummer is a good soul.
“Life’s too short to be sad,” she says. “I enjoy life.”

 

Figuring Out What It Meansto Be Black in America

Jan. 1, 2002

By Jonathan Tilove
Newhouse News Service

(UNDATED) At 73, MarionTumbleweed Beach is small and, in her pigtails and little African hat, atonce captivatingand ferocious. Few peoplehave lived a life so sinuously intertwined, so passionately engaged,with theblack American journey across the 20th century — as a teacher, writer,poet, reporter and editor, as an activist and intellectual. Her roaring,riveting recounting of her life comes fast and furious, with lyrical,spiky abandon. She is Miss Jane Pittman on speed.

So, how to explain that her home is the only one on Martin Luther King Street in Selma, Ala., with a red-and-white Smitherman lawn sign, advertising her support for the white mayor who has been frustrating black electoral ambitions since King himself marched here?

One hundred seventy-eight miles away, on Martin Luther King Drive in Atlanta, Kedist Hirpassa, a freshman at Morris Brown College, is by definition African-American. She was born in Ethiopia and raised in the United States. But her first semester at a black college has been a twisting trek through the maze of her own relationship to blackness.

“It has helped me realize that I am black,” shesays.

But, after recalling thetimes her way of speaking or taste in music has been dismissed as “white,” or remembering some irritating inefficiency at Morris Brown, she is back in the maze. Sometimes, she says, “being in an all-black school, I don’t feel like I’mblack. I feel like I have more in common with a white person than a blackperson.”

The talk of Martin Luther King streets inevitably turns to what it means to be black in America. Marion Tumbleweed Beach and Kedist Hirpassa are living proof of just how tight the black community is, and how encompassing.
If that sounds like a contradiction, it’s not. Like America, black Americais endlessly, kaleidoscopically diverse.
“Wait until you see a congregation of more than two dark-complected people,” wrote Zora Neale Hurston in 1937. (She lived on streets in Harlem and in Belle Glade, Fla., that now bear the name Martin Luther King.) “If they can’tagree on a single solitary thing, then you can go off satisfied. Those are MyPeople.”

The notion of a communityspeaking with a single voice is an invention of convenience. It comes froma broadernation and media that want to knowwhat this separate piece of America is thinking and feeling, and it worksbackward from certain evidence — blacks preferred Al Gore to George W. Bush — toprovide a quote-box of explanation.

What unites the black nation along King is a shared terrain, a sense of place and predicament. After that, anything goes.

About the only thing that all black folk in America have in common is contending with being black in America, figuring out what it means to be black in America. That turns out to be enough.

Marion Tumbleweed Beach,who defies the sense of the black community intuited from afar, who cannotquite beexplained off King, makes sense, perfectand absurd, on King. And it’s on King that Kedist Hirpassa can most freely,deeply and safely examine and cross-examine her own blackness.

When we first meet Tumbleweed — it’s the name that suits her and sticks — it is September 2000 and she is storming toward the National Voting Rights Museum, citadel of civil rights history and gathering spot for out-of-town folks in Selma to help defeat Mayor Joe Smitherman. She’s coming up the street from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, one of the movement’s sacred sites, where two white women from New York stand sentry with signs telling passing motorists that “JoeGotta Go.”

Tumbleweed disagrees.

“Yankee go home!” she screams. “Yankeego home!”

“You’re outside agitators,” she says with a sneer. “Yougoing to go back home and brag about how you freed us?”
Tumbleweed was born March 27, 1927, the 113th anniversary of the massacreof her great-grandmother’s people, the Creek Indians, by Andrew Jackson.Her great-grandfather was a free black man from Mali who had been toldby his father that his destiny lay beyond the African stars. He made hisway by salt caravan and silk ship to Mobile, Ala., arriving just afterthe end of the Civil War.

“I was supposed to die,” Tumbleweed says of her birth — she was early and sickly — but her Creek great-grandmother said, “No, she’sa tumbleweed.”

She lived most of her adult life in Chicago, an activist in both the black and American Indian communities, godmother to other writers and artists.

Her late husband, RoscoeBeach, was a teacher and jazz musician. She was very involved with the DuSableMuseumfor African American History, foundingits writers workshop and, after King’s assassination, its annual Martinmas Day celebration of King’slife. She worked at the right hand of museum founder Margaret Burroughs,with whom she maintains a fire-and-ice relationship.

“We’re not speaking, but that’s OK,” Tumbleweed says. “Wewould die for each other.”
This is a woman with more feuds than most people have friends.

“I’ve caught more hell from blacks than I have from whites,” she says. “I’velived with blacks. They had a chance to kick my ass.”

In 1965 Tumbleweed returnedbriefly to Selma to help King find places to stay for the “outside agitators” then swarming into town to support the voting rights protests that, washed in blood and redemption, were in retrospect King’scrowning moment. Never before and never again was the American public moremoved to stand so wholly and powerfully with the black freedom struggle.

“Confrontation of good and evil compressed in the tiny community of Selma generated the massive power to turn the whole nation to a new course,” Kingsaid after leading marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and on to Montgomery.

Compressed is right.

Selma seems in many ways a sleepy Southern town where they keep time by the train whistle. But the carbon of black-white conflict has been compressed so long and so hard here that the place is a gleaming, hard diamond of racial antagonism.

Selma is a city of 20,000,70 percent black. It is located in the heart of Alabama’s Black Belt, so named for the color of the rich earth, but also the stretch of America with the blackest population. They are always commemorating battles fought here, whether King’s or the Battle of Selma, where Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest was routed and the arsenal of the Confederacy fell, presaging the rebellion’send.

Selma has remained a mecca of the civil rights movement. Kedist Hirpassa made the pilgrimage in high school, on a Freedom Ride tour organized by C. Delores Tucker, head of the National Political Congress of Black Women and a friend of the King family. Tucker is best known for her campaign against gangsta rap, one in which she enlisted Hirpassa, who nonetheless admits a soft spot for the late Tupac Shakur.

Hirpassa decided she wanted to try a black college, and when the tour headed to Atlanta, she knew where she wanted that college to be.

She was born to parentsof two different, warring Ethiopian tribes — her father’s urban, light-skinned and with European features; her mother’s rural, dark-skinned, despised by her father’s people. She came to the United States at 5 and grew up at a succession of boarding and later public schools, finishing high school in Washington’sMaryland suburbs. Some in her Ethiopian circles considered her choice ofa black college quite odd.
We meet her in August 2000 during freshman week at Morris Brown, whichstraddles MLK and is part of the Atlanta University Center of black collegesthat adjoin it. In the late morning, Hirpassa, 18, is by herself in thenearly empty stands at Morris Brown’s Herndon Stadium as the football teamscrimmages and the cheerleaders thrust and shout in the pounding heat.

“I’ve never felt so much positive energy in my whole entire life from African-Americans,” Hirpassasays, and freshman week does pulse with what seems a deep and instant camaraderieand delight.

But she also notices rightoff that students at the other AUC schools — Morehouse College, Spellman College and Clark Atlanta University — “frown down” on Morris Brown as the “ghetto” school.

Morris Brown has its own distinction. While the other AUC schools were founded by whites for blacks, it was founded by blacks for blacks. Only a few years after they laid the cornerstone at Brown Chapel, the church that became home to the Civil Rights momement in Selma, the African Methodist Episcopal Church founded the Atlanta college, named for the same AME bishop. It prides itself on taking students as it finds them.

The Saturday night of freshmanweek, students from the AUC schools are brought together for an Olive Branchceremonyintended to dampen inter-schoolrivalries. Afterward, they march, thousands in all, to a party in the ClarkAtlanta stadium on King, chanting their loyalties along the way: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. You got to be a Morehouse man to party like us.” The Morris Brown reply is simple, direct. “Westart it. We end it. MBC.”

To be part of this dazzlingparade of black youth, stretching as far as the eye can see, must be a nearlyreligiousexperience, though the soundtrackat the stadium is more Mystikal (the rapper) than mystical: “Shake ya ass. But watch ya self. Shake ya ass. Show me what you’reworking with.”

Diagonally across King, 20,000 fans fill Herndon Stadium for a high school football double-header. The 440-strong Southwest DeKalb High School band is wailing brass, thundering drums. In the distance, the Atlanta skyline is set off against heavens of charcoal, blue and black. The intersection of Sunset and King is ablaze in light and motion, alive with the crosscurrent sounds of rap and football, of cruising and greeting, of Saturday night in a safe, happy, entirely black world.

King’s funeral cortegemarched past here. A few blocks up Sunset is the modest home that King, amidhis Selmatravails, bought in 1965 for $10,000.Coretta Scott King, his widow, still lives there, within distant earshotof the revelry.

On Sept. 12, 2000 in Selma, James Perkins Jr., the black candidate making his third run, defeats Joe Smitherman. The instant the news breaks, the streets are plunged into a delirium of celebration that lasts until morning.
Tumbleweed’s phone starts ringing with excited calls from friends around the country. When she tells them she was with Smitherman, they are dumbfounded. She had, after all, been one of the organizers of artists and writers for Harold Washington, who in 1983, in the most triumphant political moment in black Chicago history, was elected that city’sfirst black mayor.

Smitherman grew up poor,raised by an aunt who was the head waitress at the Splendid Cafe, where Tumbleweed’s mother was the chef. “You noticed he talks black,” Tumbleweed says. “He doesn’ttalk like a white man.”

In recent years, Smitherman,a chain smoker, a bit overweight, had taken a daily health walk past Tumbleweed’s house. She’dbe sitting in her chair under her sun umbrella and he would stop, sit. Theywould talk. It becamehis routine.

There came a time in Chicago, Tumbleweed says, when she voted for a black candidate over a better white candidate.

“It felt wrong,” she says. “I’mbored with race.”

Tumbleweed returned toSelma to live after her daughter, Carolyn Delores Beach Foucher, known asPolly, diedof cancer in 1990. Polly had been aBlack Panther in Chicago and at the funeral, former Panther Bobby Rush,now a congressman, read from Corinthians; Margaret Burroughs deliveredthe eulogy; and H. Rap Brown spoke. (The latter, now Jamil Al-Amin, ison trial at the Fulton County Courthouse on King in Atlanta, charged withthe murder of a county sheriff’s deputy, an alumnus of Morris Brown.) Tumbleweed’s good friend, the poet Sterling Plumpp, read a poem he had written, “PantherFinder (for Polly).”

“Them old blues you gottumbling from a Tumbleweed.
“A wind song jumping from a hurricane.”
With the wind song gone, the hurricane blew back to Selma.

In Atlanta, Hirpassa’s freshman year is a whirlwind of activity. She throws herself into the middle of everything but remains a loner, reserved, observing — thecalm in the storm of her own life.

She is elected freshmanclass president, but when the runner-up challenges the results, the electionis left unresolved.She is Morris Brown’s entry in the Miss AUC Freshman contest. She writes for the AUC Digest, a campus newspaper. She interns at the governor’s office. She is the youngest and only black member of a socialist group that meets at Georgia State University. During her winter break, she works at C. Delores Tucker’soffice back home, providing the Bush administration with the names of blackwomen qualified for top federal appointments.

At Morris Brown, she isintermittently enthused and exasperated. She loves the mix of black peopleand has cometo appreciate black styles that oncebewildered her. But she is also frustrated by “how things never get done.”

In the fall of 2001, she transfers to Georgia State. But, even as she moves to a majority-white school, she starts a new organization with a few students from the various AUC campuses. It is called African Brothers and Sisters. They plan to create a magazine, to read to kids in the projects along King, to agitate for reparations.

Less than a month afterSelma’selection, a monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general andfounder of the Ku Klux Klan, suddenlyappears on public land and the city is again consumed in conflict. On MartinLuther King Day 2001, protesters lasso the monument and try to pull itdown, to no avail.

Tumbleweed thinks it would make more sense to place some sturdy wrought-iron benches next to the monument so people could sit and talk about it.

“Most of the people in Selma, white and black, have never had a conversation with each other,” she says. “Allpeople have to have their heroes and symbols. To attempt to take them awayis to make an enemy.”

At the end of February, with one white councilor crossing racial lines to break the deadlock, the council votes to move the statue to a private cemetery.

The trouble with her people,Tumbleweed says, is that they are both too bothered by other people’s symbolsand too readily beguiled by their own, like the Martin Luther King Streetshe liveson.

“All those damn streets are in the black neighborhood,” she says. “No matter where you go in this country, there’sa Martin Luther King street or drive or place or avenue. I say they stillget us with trinkets. We go cheap. I resent it.”

 

Still Straining to Hear That Late Word of Freedom

Jan.1, 2002

ByJonathan Tilove
Newhouse News Service

Juneteenthis a bittersweet holiday. It commemorates the day in 1865 when blacks inTexas finally learned that they were free — 21/2years after the Emancipation Proclamation and three months after the surrenderof RobertE. Lee.
The news was delivered in Galveston, and that is where our road trip begins, June 19, 2001, where Martin Luther King Boulevard meets the beach at the Gulf of Mexico.

For twoweeks, we drive 1,100 miles up the nation’s midsection, visiting18 more MLKs: East Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas. Over to Oklahoma and upto Kansas.

We have a date in Leavenworthwith 89-year-old Rosetta Stone, whose name — evoking the ancient rock whose inscription unlocked the mysteries of Egyptian hieroglyphics — leapt from a directory of the city’slittle Martin Luther King Drive.

There are stops that testthe limits of irony: Emancipation Park along the MLK in Huntsville, Texas — prisontown and execution capital of the United States. Or the MLK in Jasper, Texas,on which James Byrd Jr. waswalking when he climbed into a pickup truck, to be dragged to his death.

To name any street forMartin Luther King Jr. is to invite an accounting of how that street makesgood on King’spromise or mocks it.

There is certainly irony that a man viewed as an apostle of integration should have given his name to a vast network of streets that define the contours of a black nation still so separate.
But you can’t live on irony, and the people we meet on these MLKs don’t.They struggle in a world that exists every day in a Juneteenth twilight,straining to make real that late word of freedom.

GALVESTON, Texas — CraigBowie ran two parades through Galveston last Juneteenth. His first marchedin the oppressivemidday heat across MartinLuther King Boulevard. The second, in the blessed relief of evening, camestriding down MLK to the gulf. It was led by a funky, second-line funeralband with a saxophone, sousaphone, snare drum and fat man with shiny blackshoes and an umbrella.

The early parade has become tradition. Bowie added the later one to draw folks down to the beach for his first-ever Juneteenth fireworks, another of his efforts to rouse Galveston to what he imagines was the jubilation of that original emancipation day.

“They say on Juneteenth, they danced in the street,” Bowiesays.
With the last liberating starburst of fireworks, Bowie, lean and boyish, jumps back on his heels, rears his head and exhales whispered affirmations of joy, thanks and relief.

But by the next morning, he is back to worrying.

“I try to stay focused on the concept, the purpose, on spreading the word,” he says of Juneteenth. “The deficit that I’ve seen is the children don’t know what it really is, they don’t know it’s about freedom, they don’t even know they’refree.

“Man, some of them, this is all they’ve seen. They are so small and they see all this junk around here and they ain’t never been across the causeway so they just think this is the world, and this island don’thave to be like this. Not this island, not this island.”

And so here, in one ofthe poorest corners of America, Bowie has created a shimmering, shoestringoasis, layingclaim to space with the bright colorsand black themes of his joyful, expressive folk art. In his big, bare-bonesstorefront his wife sells shoes, his daughter sells snow cones and he runswhat amounts to one-room schools of entrepreneurship and performing arts,both named for Howard “Stretch” Johnson, a tap-dancing communist who during a brief sojourn in Galveston became Bowie’smentor.

Johnson, a “Buffalo Soldier” inWorld War II, was a Harlem blend of raconteur and activist. He performedwith Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club and theApollo Theater on 125th Street, which is now also known as MLK Boulevard.He leafleted outside Yankee Stadium in favor of integrating baseball. BeforeGalveston, he lived in Hawaii, where he played a lead role in establishinga state Martin Luther King Holiday. He died at 85 in 2000.

“Stretch was a radical,” Bowie says. “Hetaught me how to lead.”

Not many years ago, Bowie was collecting garbage in Galveston. Before that, he did five years in prison, mostly in Huntsville. Before that, at 25, he was shot in the face with a 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun. He lost his left eye.
“I ain’t always lived like this,” he says.

On these streets, Bowie’shistory of tough times is both his credential and his inspiration.
“I want to create a miracle,” he says.

HOUSTON — The weekly BlackReality Class at the Shrine of the Black Madonna Book Store and CulturalCenter onMLK Boulevard is canceled, but the writerWalter Mosley is reading the next night, so we stay an extra day.
The Shrine and the Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church next door werefounded in Detroit by the late Albert B. Cleage Jr., who later changedhis name to Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman. The address may be MLK, but the spiritis Malcolm X. As Cleage wrote in 1972, “Dr. King’s entire approach wasa mystical kind of idealism which had no roots in objective reality.”

Mosley quotes Malcolm tellinga Harlem audience “you have been bamboozled” by America. Blacks are not the only ones bamboozled, Mosley says — justthe most alert to it.

“Black history is the only real history people should be studying in school because that’s how we can learn how to overcome oppression,” hesays.

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Juneteenthis celebrated here in Emancipation Park, founded by former slaves on whatisnow Martin Luther King Drive.

Across MLK live two sisters whose father had been conceived, but not yet born, on the first Juneteenth. Next door is St. Luke United Methodist Church. Florine Woods, president of the usher board, lets us in.

Woods, 73, short and sweet,has a bullet shell from an AR-15 military assault rifle on her keychain.It wasa going-away gift when she retiredat 62 after 10 years as a prison guard in the picket tower at the EllisUnit, a few miles out of town. She had three weapons — the AR-15 for distance,a 12-gauge shotgun for up close and a .357 Magnum for in between. She neverfired a shot. Sometimes inmates in the yard would signal her to look alert,the warden was coming.

“I miss it,” she says.

Abd’Allah Muhammad-Bey doesn’t miss his days as a prison guard back in Wilmington, Del. Muhammad-Bey — who lives in the housing project on MLK (the neighborhood kids call it the “‘jects,” “the p.j.s” and “the bricks”) — knowsthe ins and outs of imprisonment.

By the time he was 11 hewas in a juvenile facility in Wilmington. He was released into the custodyof theBlack Men’s Development Center ofthe Moorish Science Temple, the forerunner of the Nation of Islam, whichfirst sought to connect black Americans to Muslim roots. He served timemore recently, a few years ago, in the county jail in Houston when hisnow ex-wife was busted for crack. He was driving the car.

These days Muhammad-Beybrings a Muslim substance abuse program into the prisons around Huntsville,and isworking to develop a Muslim “whole-way house” for released inmates in Houston. He is studying toward his master’sin counseling at Sam Houston University. In 2000, he persuaded his fellowstudent senators, in a school where criminal justice is the leading major,to support a death penalty moratorium.

He is also the imam ofa mosque he started in a tiny geodesic dome not far from his home. He hascome toembrace a non-racialized Orthodox Islam, “like Malcolm X,” hesays.

Like the Galveston activist Craig Bowie, Muhammad-Bey seems unhardened by hard times. Like Bowie, he is on a mission to liberate the thinking of black folks.

“Most people here got a slave mentality,” hesays.

JASPER, Texas — The sky is a rich blue swept with creamy clouds, the countryside a lush green, the day warm and bright, but the simple sign, “Jasper Pop. 7160” sendsa cold shiver down the spine.

Many hundreds of peoplewere lined up along Martin Luther King Boulevard for James Byrd’s funeral;Greater New Bethel Baptist Church was filled to overflowing.

The pastor, the Rev. KennethO. Lyons, has deep roots here. His great-great-great-great grandfather wasDickSeale who, as a slave, founded New Bethel’s mother church. The family history recalls a day when the sickly infant Seale was crying in his mother’sarms in Alexandria, Va., waiting for a parade to pass. A man on a whitehorse pressed a coin into her hand and told her to buy the baby some chocolate.The man was George Washington.
Lyons runs a serious church.

A sign on the wall carriesthe adage, “A child brought up in Sunday School is rarely brought up in court.” The church bulletin advises parents to teach children “strategies to deal with racism and the negative feelings about being black that racism incurs.” However, it says, “Itis not necessary, nor is it advisable ... to bring up race at every turn.”

SAN AUGUSTINE, Texas — TheMLK here seems nothing but a residential rural road in the heart of the pineywoods.Then it turns 90 degrees to the left,and the street sign indicates that this is the intersection of MLK andMLK, something we have never seen before. Remarkable. We are excited.

So is a woman watching us from her front lawn. Dressed in her Sunday best, she yells at us to get off her street and out of her neighborhood, right now.

We explain our mission. “Martin Luther King had nothing to do with two white boys,” shesays.
We point out the uniqueness of her intersection — MLK and MLK. She looks at us with disgust. “And that’sinteresting?”

As we drive away, she is writing down our license plate number.

CENTER, Texas — Clyde Lister has “closed the lid” onsome 4,000 black folks in his 50 years at Hicks Mortuary on MLK in Center.We have cometo Lister in hopes of gaining passage to Africa, where he lives.

Africa, Texas, is close by, but along an unmarked dirt road. For about a century it has been home to 20-some black families. The heart of Africa is the simple white St. John Baptist Church. Behind the church is a graveyard alive with fresh flowers.

Lister and his good friend, Eddie Logan, a deacon of the church, figure maybe this place was named Africa because, in the whippoorwill solitude, a black man could imagine himself back in the homeland he had never seen.

Lister spies a cottontailhopping between headstones. “They tell me if you take a bite of rabbit and chew it up and lay it on something and come back the next morning, it’s a ball of hair,” hesays.

Logan gives Lister a long,wide-eyed stare. “Oh no,” he says.

“I never did try it,” Lister says. “Ialways swallowed mine.”

They burst into the loud laughter of longtime friends.

SHREVEPORT, La. — Wehave come to Shreveport in search of the statue of King that stood brieflyat the head of Martin Luther King Drive, a major thoroughfare with an abandonedquiet to it.

Thecity commissioned the 1,500-pound bronze for $40,000. But the statue — in which King links supernaturally extended and contorted arms with a man and woman on either side of him — wasbitterly attacked by some who were disturbed by its abstractness. Thelast we had read about it, the work had been removed and put up for auctionon eBay, where no one had bid more than a few thousand dollars.

But, we discover, the bronze MLK has found a good home.

“I woke up one morning and the Lord told me to call the mayor and buy the statue,” saysBishop Floyd Caldwell.
Sight unseen. He paid $15,000, raised in cooperation with a restaurateur who gave contributors catfish coupons.
At 7, Caldwell says, he watched as his grandfather burst into his homeand killed his abusive father. By 1971, Caldwell — junkie, drug dealer, pimp — wasset to kill himself when he saw Billy Graham on television and turnedto God. He now has one of the largest congregations in Shreveport anda worldwideradio ministry.

The King statue standsin a garden between Caldwell’s Greenwood Acres Full Gospel Church and the church’sFamily Life Center, the latter with state-of-the-art health club, bowlingalley, gleaming basketball courts, elegant restaurant, witty Afrocentricreworkings of classic paintings, board room and offices in elegantash wood.
Caldwell says that what black folks want and need is “money and lotsof it.”

“The white man knows he owes us reparations. He’ll never give it to us because he’smad. The white man is mad because Negroes are no longer slaves, andthe Negroes are mad because the white man once had them as slaves.”

Instead, he says, “theaim in America is to give every young black a felony.”

IDABEL, Okla. — “You’re not a local yokel, are you?” RaeshandaAndrews asks as we purchase four newspapers from her at the E-Z Mart.

As we explain what broughtus here, her eyes light up. “You’re taking the trip I want to take,” she says. “I was talking with a friend about this last night. Why is it always in the ‘hood?Martin Luther King is always in the ghetto.”
Andrews was born in the housing projects on what is now Idabel’s MLK.

The ‘hood? The ghetto?Across MLK from her projects, three horses graze lazily on 60 acres of greenpasture.The horses belong to Andrew Young,a 35-year-old of grace and power who hays the MLK acreage. He has asteer ranch nearby. A white doctor who took a liking to him helped him getthis land, learn to work it and sell his first hay.
Young is also the county’s first and only black firefighter.

“It’s all pretty cool, man,” he says. “I always wanted to be a firefighter and I always wanted to be a rancher. I’mdoing just what I wanted to do.”

For four hours in the slow fade of a luminous day, arrayed around the back of his pickup as the horses amble by for affection, we talk with Young and his brother Craig about life and fate and Idabel.

In 1980, William HenryJohnson, a 15-year-old black youth, was shot to death in the parking lotof a whitenightclub across a fence from the mostlyblack projects. Young says that Johnson — “He was like a best friend to me” — wasleft hanging on that fence.

It’s the story that spread through the black community, says Maxine Moss, Raeshanda Andrews’ mother,who was living in the projects then. But Moss says Johnson actuallywas left lying where he was shot, where her brother found him.

Either way, there followedwhat the national press described as a race riot in which several more peopledied. “It was more like a black revolt,” saysMoss, a staff sergeant with the Air Force Reserve and now a civilianemployee at Scott Air Force Base in Belleville, Ill.

Idabel, she says, is “one of those places, you get out of, you don’t look back — youmight get stuck there.”

OKLAHOMA CITY — The menat the very mellow Zodiac Motorcycle Club on King say we need to meet ClaraLuper,and that she is probably just down MLKrehearsing the Miss Black Oklahoma contestants.

The pageant is being held at a threadbare motel (it soon closes for good). Luper, who has run the show for 32 years, lifts it from the shabby dust of its circumstance by sheer force of will and dignity.

In 1957, she took a groupof black youngsters to Harlem to perform a play she had written, “Brother President: The Story of Martin Luther King.” For the first time, they were able to eat in the same restaurant with white people. “It gave my young people a taste of freedom,” Lupersays.

The summer after theirreturn, they began sitting in at Katz Drug Store in Oklahoma City — a yearand a half before the sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C., that history usually enshrinesas the first. Theirs continued forsix years until, in 1964, they prevailed. Luper has been arrested 26times.

She built a Freedom Center on King, to honor the heroes of the struggle. It was bombed and mostly destroyed in 1968. She rebuilt.

Luper is loved; Luper is feared. She can be very funny, but in repose, her face relaxes into a scowl.

She schools the beautycontestants in civil rights history the week they are with her. At breakfasttwo daysbefore the pageant, she announces shewill give them each an oral exam on what she taught them. “The passing grade is 100,” shesays.

Only a few miles up King from the pageant is the Mabel Bassett Correctional Facility for Women and the death row where Wanda Jean Allen passed her last days. Allen was sentenced to death for killing the girlfriend she met doing time in Mabel Bassett for killing her last girlfriend. Her lawyers argued, to no avail, that she was not very bright and that her original lawyer was not very good.

We meet the Rev. VernonBurris, a radio preacher resplendent in a white suit, outside Mabel Bassett’s barbed-wire fence. Burris was Allen’sspiritual adviser the last 10 months of her life, though by the end, hesays, shewas the one keeping his spirits up.

He agreed to baptize herin the prison chapel waters, and when she brought along the other two womenondeath row — both white — he baptized themas well.

When Allen’s time came to die, she asked Burris to be her witness. “They asked if she had any last words and she quoted a Scripture that was used 2,000 years ago when Christ was on the cross, when he was about to be executed,” he says. “She said, ‘Lord forgive them, for they know not what they do.”’

LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — Rosetta Stone is her married name. She picked upthe saxophone in her 60s after her husband died. Took one lesson,but when she found out her teacher was also taking lessons, she figured,how much could he know?

Instead, she prayed onit. “God taught me how to put the notes together to play a song. I wouldn’t know A-flat if I saw it walking down the street,” shesays.

She adjusts the mouthpieceon Ragamuffin, her name for her beautifully tarnished sax, and begins toplay her versionof “Jesus Never Fails.” She says her air isn’twhat it used to be, but the tone is rich, clear, smooth.
She mostly plays in her Pentecostal church.

But she also plays forherself. “If I don’t encourage nobody else, I can encourage myself,” she says. “I know how people feel when they’resinging the blues.”

 

What’s Up, and What’sComing Up

Jan.1, 2002

ByJonathan Tilove
Newhouse News Service

MartinLuther King Boulevard — 125th Street in Harlem — is the singlemost recognized and self-aware black street in the world.

You want to get the absolutely latest thinking on being black, just walk along 125th with your ears and eyes open. Listen to the street preachers. Read the posters plastered to every available space, demanding self-knowledge, freedom, action.

You want art so cutting-edgethey call it “post-black,” go straight to the Studio Museum on MLK. You want analysis of how global capitalism is going to sweep blacks out of Harlem, you can buy “Harlem Ain’t Nothin’ But a Third World Country,” righton the street, sold by the author.

You want character?Harlem is laid out like a village, low-slung, great light, and evenfriendlyin a hustling New York kind of way. Like LangstonHughes wrote in his 1950 poem “125th Street”: “Face like a chocolate bar;full of nuts and sweet.”

It is the Broadwayof blackness. It’s what’s up.
But if you want to know what’s coming up, then you’ve got to go tothe Martin Luther King Boulevard in Belle Glade, Fla.

That’s right. Thinkoff-Broadway. Think off-off Broadway.
Lost amid the sugar cane and snapping gators along the shores of Lake Okeechobee in western Palm Beach County, Belle Glade has a primordial, in-the-beginning quality to it. Things seem to happen here first, and in concentrate.

Two months before the 2000 presidential election, black folks in Belle Glade were screaming about a stolen election, the one in which they lost their black majority on the city council in a community where blacks outnumber whites three to one. And, in November 2000, there were nearly enough botched butterfly ballots at the polling places on MLK alone to make Al Gore president.

And the muck — that’s what they call the ebony soil where things grow like Jack’s beanstalk — doesn’t just produce more sugar cane and sweet corn than any other place in the country. Glades Central High School produces more professional football players than any other high school in America. Right now, Glades’ ReidelAnthony, James Jackson, Willie Jones, Robert Newkirk, Johnny Rutledge,Jimmy Spencer and Fred Taylor are all playing in the National FootballLeague.

BELLE GLADE, January2000 — “You close your eyes, you’re going to miss it,” James Leonard, a hairstylist at Betty’sBeauty Salon on MLK, says of the Martin Luther King Day parade.

He’s right. The mostimpressive thing about the King Day parade here is that there is one;the next-mostimpressive thing is that there is an MLKdown which to march. On first sight, Belle Glade seems to exist in a worldbefore King.

“Ground so rich that everything went wild. ... People wild too,” as Zora Neale Hurston, who lived on what are now MLKs in both Harlem and Belle Glade, described it in her 1936 novel, “TheirEyes Were Watching God.”
It was the muck that drew successive waves of African-Americans, Jamaicans, Haitians and now Mexicans to Belle Glade in search of work.

At a church dinnerafter the parade, we meet Harma Miller, who despite a predilectionto show upat St. John’s Baptist services in outfits so loud they could wake the dead, is nobody’sfool.

Miller picked vegetables until she was 12, the youngest of six daughters of a migrant crew chief.

That was then. Now,she says, “I’ma funeral director. I have a floral design license. I teach and trainteachers, and I speak all of the Romancelanguages. All six of us girls went to college and all of us have morethan one job. Four of us do real estate on the side. I made more moneyon my eight houses than I do teaching.”

She is also — at least until September, and that fateful election — mayorof Belle Glade. The mayor is picked from among the council and while Millerhas served as mayor before, this is the first time the council has hada black majority.

It was a long timecoming. Even though whites are only 14 percent of Belle Glade’s 15,000people, the city held its local elections in September, when the migrantworkersare away. The new black majority voted to moveElection Day to March, effective 2002.

Miller’s husband, Henry, runs the family mortuary along MLK. It was he, along with other local members of King’sfraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, who petitioned to have a street named forKing. Harma Miller was on the council that approved it.

Belle Glade’s MLK is alive like Harlem’s,if not as well-lit.

You can happen uponthe tambourine joy of a Jamaican revival meeting along the loadingramp where themigrant workers assemble before dawn, or a flatbedtruck of strippers in the lot at Tiny’s liquors, advertising their Miamiclub.

You can buy skinned rabbits by the tree where the men play dominoes. When the cane fields are burned for harvesting, the breeze flutters with black ash and the rabbits sprint for freedom, where they run into men and boys who chase and beat them. Run rabbits, and football comes easy.

With darkness, peopledescend on King’s corners, like “dust,” says Lester Finney. “Thepolice even got a term where they call it the street sweep, which is getrid of the brothers hanging on the corner.”

Finney makes T-shirts in his grim-looking edifice on King with its street-side mural of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, both shot dead in their 20s in seeming fulfillment of the thug life they rapped about. He personalizes the designs freehand while his homemade chicken-wire-and-spit dryer creaks and squeaks the freshly silk-screened shirts along.

He’s the neighborhood paladin, guru, herald and pal, his shop a sanctuary, safe and warm. He is also, as Muhammad Lester Finney, the Nation of Islam’sman in the muck, donning a gray suit and bow tie to sell the Final Callon King.

After high school,Finney left Belle Glade on a football scholarship to McPherson CollegeinKansas. “I didn’t want no part of Belle Glade,” hesays.

But he came back. “I don’t care who knows that I helped somebody,” he says. “I’mjust here to see the results.”

HARLEM, January 2001 — Theycelebrate blackness every day in Harlem. There is no Martin LutherKing Day parade, but the Krispy Kreme at the cornerof MLK and Frederick Douglass offers free glazed doughnuts for the holiday.

Upstairs is the Sweet Home Harlem church of the United House of Prayer for All People, founded in 1919 by a Cape Verdian immigrant, Sweet Daddy Grace, a charismatic, faith-healing revival preacher. Today there are 132 congregations and all the church properties are bought and paid for, says Malcolm Barksdale, an active member. Barksdale also deals in Harlem real estate.

The church is knownfor the ecstatic, rafter-shaking, soul-lifting music of the tromboneshoutbands that infuses its worship. Here in Harlem, itis the McCullough Sons of Thunder — nine trombones plus trumpet, tuba, cymbals and drums — ledby Elder Edward Babb, lean, lithe and very cool. He is a bus driver.

On the Sunday beforeKing Day, the Sons of Thunder wail like heaven’s house band. When a woman rises, sways and twitches into a fit of reverie, trilling in tongues, her church sisters in starched white uniforms coolly move in to steady and comfort. In the rear of the sanctuary, 30 young Japanese women on a “Soul Tour” ofHarlem watch in rapt stillness.

“Harlem’s known around the world, people want to come to see Harlem,” says Sikhulu Shange. Shange has owned the Record Shack below the church on 125th for 22 years but says that, like others who sustained the street during lean times, he is now “up against the wall” ofgentrification.

At 6 foot 4, a Zuluin African dress, Shange is a man of regal bearing, by turns polemicaland playful.His r’s roll elegantly off his tongue.His long, narrow store is barely wider than he is tall. He first came toNew York to perform on Broadway as part of a South African theater troupe.He refused to return to apartheid.

Not far up MLK fromShange is a site mostly unremembered. In 1958, a black woman, a domesticworkerup from Georgia, stabbed Martin Luther King Jr.as he signed books at Blumstein’s department store. “You’ve made enough people suffer!” shescreamed, plunging a letter opener into his chest, barely missing his aorta.

Later she told policeshe thought his name was “Arthur Lucer King.” From his hospital bed, King said he felt no ill will, only concern “thata climate of hatred and bitterness so permeate areas of our nation thatinevitably deeds of extreme violence must erupt.”

BELLE GLADE, November2000 — At the annual Muck Bowl against neighboring Pahokee, there is a moment of silence for Juran Seider, a 17-year-old defensive tackle for the Glades Central Raiders, shot to death over the summer while watching a dice game in an empty lot next to Lester Finney’s.He was just killing time until his girlfriend, who was having her hair braided,was ready to be picked up.

The call came to the Seider home just after midnight.

“I just fell on my knees,” recalls Cathy Seider, Juran’s mother. “I told that boy that those corners going to still be here when he’sdead and gone.”

Even so, Seider loves BelleGlade. “My mama raised 10 kids here. The oldest one is in Atlanta. I think he’s moving back here,” she says. “I wouldn’ttrade Belle Glade for nothing.”

Nearly 2,000 people cameto her son’s funeral, which was held at the highschool. Miller Mortuary buried him. Finney made memorial T-shirts.

Finney has cut a CD, “Message to the People.” When some young women stop by, he plays a song, rapping along with it. “Hey you, pretty little girl, you slow down now, you’re growing up too fast. Like to get attention in the way that you can, even if it’s the attention of a full-grown man. Hey you, pretty little girl. Let’s slow it down now. Don’t grow up too fast.” Acouple of the girls join in harmony.

The Muck Bowl is on the Friday after the 2000 election. The next Monday, the Rev. Jesse Jackson leads a march and rally in West Palm Beach to seek a recount or a revote. With Jackson is Harma Miller, by now the defeated mayor, who has filed a suit claiming that her white opponents stuffed the ballot box to oust her and another black woman in the Belle Glade election two months earlier.

“There is a direct line from Selma to Florida,” Jacksondeclares, linking the 2000 election dispute to the voting rights struggleof the 1960s.

HARLEM, November 2001 — Thanksgiving weekend, the Rev. Al Sharpton, broadcasting his weekly radio show from his headquarters just off MLK, talks about the recent deaths of black folks — killed in crossfire, killed for a gold chain — byother black folks.

“We have been fighting the wrong enemies,” Sharpton says. “Saythat again, slow. Call somebody you know, tell them to turn on the radio,someone you knowbeen fighting the wrong enemy. Somebody in the beauty parlor, come out fromunder the dryer, you need to hear this. Dry later.”

In the worst day in recentHarlem history, in December 1996, a black street vendor walked into Freddy’s, a white-owned clothing store on MLK, and shouted, “All blacks out.” He set the store ablaze and opened fire, killing eight people — white, Hispanic and black — himself included. He apparently acted in solidarity with ongoing protests against Freddy’s, which was threatening to evict its subtenant, Shange’sRecord Shack.

Five years later, Freddy’s is back in business as Uptown Jeans, and Shange — now dealing directly with agents of the United House of Prayer upstairs, which owns the building — isagain facing rent increases he says will put him out of business.

First, the Harlem USA mall,with its giant HMV music store, moved across the street, and then, over thesummer, Bill Clinton moved into an office buildinga couple of blocks in the other direction. On the day the ex-president arrives — a white man becoming the most famous person on the most famous black street in the world — Shange can only shake his head. “The jig is up,” hesays.

Allan Katatumba, a youngman from Uganda who has just moved into an apartment across from Sharpton’s headquarters with his wife, a white woman he met while living in Idaho, comes by to offer Shange his support. He calls Shange “chief.”

For hours, they argue Africanpolitics. Shange has raised money to rebuild a school in his home villageand returns frequently to bring supplies. Thepoverty there is beyond American comprehension, he says, but the source ofthat misery is, in his view, the same as that which threatens his future onMLK — “capitalism.”

“We’re about to be hanging by our own bootstraps,” hesays.

Upstairs, in the Houseof Prayer cafeteria, Malcolm Barksdale, who is writing a book on Harlem’s history, observes that “Harlemhas always been owned by whites.”

Barksdale loves Harlem. “It’s real townie, and yet it’s a ghetto.” But, he says, there is nothing fixed about it being black. The space is just too prime, and Clinton’s arrival only boosted already booming property values. “I’m happy Clinton is here,” hesays.

Of course, Sept. 11 hascast a pall over any clear calculations of Harlem’sfuture, as it has on everything in New York.

At a firehouse on MLK (noneof its crew was lost on Sept. 11), passing schoolchildren swarm around thefirefighters, thrusting notebooks upward for autographs. “I feel like a Yankee,” saysfirefighter Joe McCarney.

At the military recruitingstation on King, Sgt. First Class Eric J. Vidal says business is great. SinceSept. 11, when he goes to the projects he gets, “Hey, Private Ryan,” “Hey, MacArthur,” thethumbs up.

But few flags fly alongMartin Luther King Boulevard, and lots of posters express doubt. “Chickens come home to roost,” says one. “The sad truth is that America has killed more African-Americans than Osama bin Laden Ever Will,” readsanother.

BELLE GLADE, November 2001 — Lester Finney reports that two guys from the corner shot and killed each other over the summer. “They were both my kids,” hesays.

Glades Central defeatedPahokee in the Muck Bowl, again, and this year Finney’s Muck Bowl T-shirts carried the legend “Collard Greens, Wild Rabbit, Fried Gator. That’sWhat It Takes To Be A Raider.”

And, of course, the town was all over the news just after Sept. 11 when it was reported that Mohamed Atta, believed to have piloted one of the jets into the World Trade Center, had been in Belle Glade at least twice in the months before the attack. He came to inquire about crop dusters.