Fit for a King?

driving force: As Martin Luther King Jr. Day approaches, Sonny Driver continues his push to have West River Drive renamed in King's honor. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Why Philly doesn't have a street named after Martin Luther King Jr.

by Doron Taussig

Five years ago, a journalist named Jonathan Tilove set out to visit all of the Martin Luther King boulevards, avenues, drives, and streets in America. There are more than 500 of them, and over the course of two years, Tilove walked along each one, discovering in them a profound continuity. He was traveling, he wrote, along a "black Main Street" that ran through nearly every African-American neighborhood in the country.

His journey did not bring him to Philadelphia.

It's hard to believe that there's no MLK street in Philly. Tilove didn't; he called up the Streets Department, where a spokesperson, thinking of Cecil B. Moore, told him that there is one. There's not. There's an MLK High School (on Stenton) and a recreation center (on Cecil B. Moore), but no street.

Several years ago, a movement to dedicate an MLK began. It has made little headway. Some cities identified their MLK immediately after the civil rights leader's assassination. Others fought battles that were proud extensions of the civil rights movement itself. Philly's effort comes down to this: one man sitting in a cluttered office in North Philadelphia with a box full of signatures, lost in the maze of city bureaucracy.

"There's got to be 5,000 in there, easy," says Sonny Driver of the signatures, looking down from his desk at the petitions to change the name of West River Drive to Martin Luther King Drive. An informal count confirms that there is at least that many. The problem is, Driver hasn't figured out what to do with them.

Driver, who describes himself as a "seasoned senior citizen," is a cheerful man with a jam-packed memory in which items occasionally get jumbled. His office is much the same: the walls are addled with newspaper clippings in various shades of yellow, the darkest being the first edition of Scoop USA, a weekly community newspaper Driver has published out of his Watts Street office since 1960. There are also 30-plus civic awards and many, many pictures. The largest is a poster of an attractive woman, dripping wet in a clinging, translucent top; the second-largest is a headshot of Martin Luther King Jr.

Driver says that it was five years ago when he first realized there was no MLK in Philadelphia.

"I was traveling, and I saw that the first main street along the riverfront [in Camden] is Martin Luther King Highway," he says. "They've got one in Wilmington, Del., too. I said, "We don't have anything!'"

So Driver launched a campaign to bring an MLK to Philly. In addition to the petitions, he runs an ad every week in Scoop exhorting readers to join the "Coalition to name West River Drive "Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive'" and has organized several demonstrations at the site, each of which he says attracted about 30 or 40 people.

"Why do they have a street named after Christopher Columbus? Or Jefferson?" he asks. "Why do they have a Delaware Avenue? That originally was named after the Delaware Indians. None of them as far as I'm concerned meet and qualify or come up to the standards of what Dr. Martin Luther King did — for all the people."

Driver has been around long enough to recall being turned away from whites-only establishments, and he was there to cover King's 1963 rally at Girard College when King called on the school to integrate. He considers King a personal hero and believes it's important that Philadelphia recognize the man on its map.

It's not clear why Philadelphia is the only major American city that hasn't done so.

Driver says it's racism, but it's hard to imagine that the legacy of racism in Philly is much stronger than it is in Jasper, Texas, where you can find the MLK that James Byrd was walking on in 1998 when he accepted a ride from a group of white men who murdered him and dragged his body three miles with a pick-up truck. Other people cite provinciality, thinking that a town like Philly might just prefer to honor local figures, such as Cecil B. Moore. But MLK High School and MLK Recreation Center suggest otherwise.

Jerry Mondesire of the Philly NAACP and state Rep. Jewell Williams point their fingers at past leaders. "I think the leaders of the past have dropped the ball," says Williams. But movements to name an MLK have historically been grassroots, not top-down, according to Tilove. It could be that Philadelphians just didn't realize they didn't have an MLK.

In any case, there's a grassroots movement now, and such local leaders as Williams and state Sen. Vincent Hughes have voiced their support for naming a street after King. Mondesire agrees, although he says that "changing a street name is not high up on my list."

Whether West River Drive is the right street is another matter. Driver selected it because of its physical beauty, because it has a boring name (it has been targeted before, most recently by a group looking to honor Lucien Blackwell), and because it has few residents who might resist changing their address (people in other cities have opposed changing their street's name to MLK because they think it suggests a bad neighborhood). Still others may oppose West River Drive because it doesn't run through a black community.

But such a debate has not seen the light of day in Philadelphia. It is lost in the murky depths of government procedure.

When City Paper first contacted Sonny Driver, he said he had spoken with several council members and had reason to believe that the council was close to passing an ordinance changing West River Drive to Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. But West River Drive is in the Fairmount Park Commission's jurisdiction. And the commission's chief of staff, Barry Bessler, says he has never heard of Driver or his MLK campaign.

Driver was flabbergasted to learn this.

"They got a lot of nerve!" he declared. Driver said Robert Nix, the president of the commission's board, had previously told him to take the matter to City Council.

Nix recalls telling Driver that the commission couldn't "change the name in a vacuum," meaning it would consult City Council on the matter but not defer to it. He says that, going forward, the first thing Driver should do is turn his petitions over to the commission to "get the process started," but Driver is reluctant to do so. "To give up those petitions, that's really not legal," he says. He fears that people who signed on to change the name of West River Drive could end up on an unwanted mailing list. "I'll have to talk to [Nix]," he says.

Driver is also frustrated about how long the process has taken. "Five years!" he says. "They changed Kelly Drive overnight! Overnight!" (East River Drive was renamed Kelly Drive, for John B. Kelly, in 1985.) "That's just a shame. They gonna have to name the place after me if they mess around much longer."

The road has been harder than Sonny Driver anticipated, and the end is not quite in sight. But he can already picture Martin Luther King Drive, and it's magnificent.

"Across from Boathouse Row, there's a plateau where you could put benches, and a statue of King," he says. "People could sit and read a book and the scenery across the river makes you want to sit down and relax."

Driver looks pleased, as though he's overlooking the site from a bench by the water.

"That drive," he says, "is the most beautiful place it could be."