Creating a New Geography of Memory in the South: (Re)naming of Streets in Honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The (re)naming of streets in honor of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. is quickly becoming a common yet controversial feature on the southern urban landscape. This new trend in place-naming reflects efforts by African Americans to create a new geography of memory in a region where much of its landscape has long been used and reserved for remembering (and memorializing) primarily white-controlled and dominated conceptions of the past. This paper articulates a theoretical framework for understanding the struggles that local African-American communities face in the street-(re)naming process. The controversy surrounding MLK street (re)naming can be analyzed in relation to three interrelated struggles: (1) the politics of place-naming, the struggle of African Americans to inscribe their ideological values and aspirations about race relations into the symbolism of place-names; (2) the politics of memory, the struggle of African Americans to reconstruct the region's collective memory of the past through commemoration; and (3) the politics of space and scale, the struggle of African Americans to engage in commemoration of King as it is affected by the long-standing authority of whites to control the scale of black expression and mobilization, black attitudes toward space, and the politics of designing the city. This paper attempts to build a greater understanding of how geography constitutes and structures the production of memory within society.