A Street Fit for a King: Naming Places and Commemoration in the American South

The naming of streets after Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) is an importantarena for African Americans as they rewrite the landscape of southern identity and commemoration. While less ornate and ostentatious than museums and monuments, MLK streets are powerful and highly contested cultural geographies because of their potential to connect disparate communities and incorporate a vision of the past into the spatial practices of everyday life. They reveal the importance of location, particularly intra-urban location, to public memorialization. Naming streets for King is a significant part of the nonmetropolitan South as well as larger cities and dependent upon the relative size of a city's African-American population. When estimating the intra-urban character of MLK streets within several southern states, findings suggest that they are located in census areas that are generally poorer and with more African Americans than citywide averages. Analysis reveals a geographic unevenness in the frequency of businesses having an address identified with King. When compared with the stereotypical American thoroughfare of “Main” Street, the address composition of MLK streets appears to be more residential in nature, although there is significant state by state variation.     

Street names and the scaling of memory: the politics of commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr within the African American community

Streets named for Martin Luther King, Jr are common yet controversial features in cities across the United States. This paper analyses the politics of naming these streets as a 'scaling of memory'– a socially contested process of determining the geographic extent to which the civil rights leader should be memorialized. Debates over the scaling of King's memory revolve around the size of the named street, the street's level of prominence within a hierarchy of roads, and the degree to which the street transcends the spatial confines of the black community. A street-naming struggle in Eatonton, Georgia (USA) exposes how the scaling of memory can become a point of division and contest within the black community as activists seek to fulfil different political goals. Analysing these intra-racial contests allows for a fuller appreciation of the historical consciousness and geographic agency of African Americans rather than seeing them as a single, monolithic group.     

School Names as Cultural Arenas: The Naming of U.S. Public Schools after Martin Luther King,Jr.

The commemoration of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) is a growing movement in many American cities and towns. School naming is an important yet underanalyzed part of this project. A recent struggle in Riverside, California over naming a high school for MLK is used as a springboard for: (1) conceptualizing school names as cultural arenas for debating student and community identity and (2) conducting a general study of the types of U.S. public schools named for King. As illustrated in California, school naming can be interpreted by one social group as a means of integrating and inspiring students historically and viewed by another group as a means of drawing boundaries around students in terms of race and local heritage. According to 1997-1998 data, 110 public schools bear King's name. They are located most often in the central cities of large and mid-size urban areas. King's name is most frequently found on schools that teach early and middle grades. Schools named for Martin Luther King do not necessarily denote a "Black" school in terms of the racial characteristics of students, although they do not fully integrate Whites with African Americans or Whites with minorities in general. Naming schools for King is part of a larger refashioning of the urban cultural landscape as racial and ethnic groups increasingly seek public recognition of their historical achievements.     

The Power of Naming: The Toponymic Geographies of Commemorated African-Americans

The importance of commemorative place-naming has been the focus of numerous studies that explore the relationship between memory and political representation. Few studies, however, have systematically examined regional geographical patterns of racial minorities in the United States. Using a variety of Internet-based mapping tools, I have collected a data set on the regional variation of the commemoration of thirty famous African-Americans (fifteen men and fifteen women). The research presented here explores how there are regional characteristics associated with where African-Americans are commemorated, particularly pertaining to cities. I also explore the geographic dispersal of these commemorations and whether there is a gender bias in the process of commemoration. Additionally, I focus on the duality of commemorations as an index of both African-American and the dominant white power structures.     

Making New Zealanders through commemoration: Assembling Anzac Day in Auckland, 1916–1939

Abstract:  Anzac Day in New Zealand has been traditionally framed within a nationalist discourse, in which the events of the day have provided the medium for the remembrance of a singular national event. Moving beyond this interpretative tradition the paper examines Anzac Day as a moment in the exercise of an ongoing governmental power concerned with issues of contemporary conduct. Focusing on interwar Auckland the paper traces the assemblage of time, space and rhetoric, which enabled the production of a commemorative, governmental landscape.     

URBAN LIVEABILITY IN CONTEXT

The Census of Canada tells us much about dwellings but little about neighborhood environment. If we want to know just how many Canadians live in homogeneous, modern, low-density suburbs, the best that many scholars can do presently is to assign each Census Tract (CT) to a category of neighborhood environment, and then add up counts of households in all CTs that fit into a specified category. However, Statistics Canada also provides summary data at a finer geographic scale: the Enumeration Area (EA). This paper explores a measure of neighborhood environment derived using a circle of fixed radius drawn around each EA centroid. Each EA centroid is at the center of its own circle but also may lie within circles drawn around other EAs. In this paper, each circle is assigned to a category of neighborhood environment on the basis of housing found in EAs whose centroids lie within the circle. Categorization of neighborhood environment is based on principal type of dwelling and period of construction found within the circle, and the homogeneity of the stock. This paper finds significant differences in neighborhood characterizations when using EA circles compared to CTs. These differences are most marked in the case of larger urban areas. The paper considers why this is the case.     

纪念邢台地震30周年

文章回顾了当年邢台人民在常中央和全国人民的关怀支援下，以自力更生、艰苦奋斗的精神抗震救灾、恢复家园的豪壮历史，并热情地介绍了３０年来邢台人民取得的伟大成就，谨以此纪念邢台地震３０周年。     

A Street Fit for a King: Naming Places and Commemoration in the American South

The naming of streets after Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) is an importantarena for African Americans as they rewrite the landscape of southern identity and commemoration. While less ornate and ostentatious than museums and monuments, MLK streets are powerful and highly contested cultural geographies because of their potential to connect disparate communities and incorporate a vision of the past into the spatial practices of everyday life. They reveal the importance of location, particularly intra‐urban location, to public memorialization. Naming streets for King is a significant part of the nonmetropolitan South as well as larger cities and dependent upon the relative size of a city's African‐American population. When estimating the intra‐urban character of MLK streets within several southern states, findings suggest that they are located in census areas that are generally poorer and with more African Americans than citywide averages. Analysis reveals a geographic unevenness in the frequency of businesses having an address identified with King. When compared with the stereotypical American thoroughfare of “Main” Street, the address composition of MLK streets appears to be more residential in nature, although there is significant state by state variation.