Two men outside the mini-mart on Carey Avenue and Martin Luther King Boulevard pass a bottle of beer back and forth, treating it like a baton. Swig, savor, pass. Swig, savor, pass. It takes about an hour to scrape up the money to get a 40-ounce of Olde English, but only a minute or so to empty it. This is how they spend their mornings—inebriated. When customers stop in for gas or knickknacks, one of them will ask for change, ever mindful of the unwritten rules of panhandling: Be polite, speak softly, maintain a safe distance (five feet is good). The taller one, a spitting image of Grady from Sanford & Son, will reach for the money with his dry, grizzled left hand and, once he has it, will then extend his right hand in a show of fidelity. His short, bald cohort, seemingly of Hispanic descent, will nod in approbation, mouthing a barely audible “thank you.” If they’re still short of money, it’s off to the large dirt lot behind the store to scavenge. Or across the street to the Citizens Area Transit bench looking for loose change, or to the nearby courtyard of the Clark County Community Resource Center, where a handful of people come every day to sit on the benches, eat lunch or admire the statue of Martin Luther King Jr. Money often falls from their pockets, mostly the kind that clinks, but sometimes the kind that folds.
Pretty good likeness of King, I tell the taller man, who vehemently disagrees. “I like the man and what he stood for. His nose is too big. They only built this place so that people in the neighborhood didn’t have to go to Civic Center and Las Vegas Boulevard [North Las Vegas City Hall] for court. They got that FBI building down the street and the court here, so now they can keep their hands on us. A lot of niggas around here are ex-felons.”
Including you?
“I can’t tell you that.”
Ever think about what he’d say if he saw you getting drunk on his street?
“Nope.”
Every year about this time, America immerses itself in a veritable Martin Luther King-a-palooza. Schoolkids learn of his “dream.” Municipalities host parades. Black intellectuals speak out and up. Elders of the civil rights movement remind us of King’s altruism, his willingness to forgive and forbear much, his ultimate sacrifice (death from an sniper’s bullet on April 4, 1968, in Memphis). In light of all he has been—civil-rights heavyweight, moral compass, Time magazine’s 1963 man of the year, elected the third greatest American of all time in a Discovery Channel/AOL public-opinion poll—it may seem crass to look at King through the prism of the streets named in his honor (730 across America, so tallied by East Carolina University geography professor Derek Alderman in 2006) and to compare his vaunted legacy with the (sometimes gritty) reality of the pavement honoring him.
In many large cities, King-named streets traverse neighborhoods seen as militarized zones, places where you don’t want to break down after dark. Ours (a six-mile road running north-south from Oakey to Craig) has similar notoriety, particularly the stretch from Bonanza to Carey, scene of its fair share of drive-by shootings and murders. In the past two months alone, within a quarter-mile of the Lake Mead-MLK intersection, Metro reported 449 crimes, including 36 stolen vehicles, 33 assaults, 11 gun-related batteries and 12 incidents of assault with a deadly weapon. I walked the street, not all six miles, only those blocks deemed the most perilous, both day and night, to gain perspective.
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Outside Greater St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church, an all-white sanctuary built in 1977 at the corner of MLK and Lawry (a block north of Lake Mead), three church-goers unload bread from the trunks of older-model cars. Aside from a few coats of paint, the church is much unchanged from the early days. An older woman, who declines to give her name, says the area improved immediately after Gerson Park was razed. Rough neighborhood it was. Maybe the city’s worst, she says. Now a phalanx of one-story houses occupies that acreage. Low-level commerce (McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, a CVS Pharmacy) has followed the rooftops. “This neighborhood is no worse than the quote-unquote good neighborhoods,” the woman says. “They got crime in Summerlin. If it was so bad, people would be scared to drive on it. It’s so busy.”
Busy, indeed. It’s one of our busiest thoroughfares. Talk is of widening the street to ease traffic flows. Back in 1987, when activists convinced politicians to change the name from Highland to MLK Boulevard, they envisioned traffic problems of a different sort. “We wanted to promote all the good things in the community, to promote it as an alternative destination for tourists,” says Katie Duncan, founder of the newly established Ward 5 Chamber of Commerce. The new name, she says, would let visitors know where the African-American community was located. So if they wanted to go to church, eat the best soul food or buy black-eyed peas and greens, they’d know where to come. Faye Duncan-Daniel, founder of the Professional Black Women’s Alliance, figured demand for goods (more restaurants, recreational amenities and big-box retailers) would eventually stimulate supply. It hasn’t. Perceptions have been tainted.
“Nobody in his right mind is going to invest in an area where they think bullets are flying,” Duncan-Daniel says. “King would be disappointed.”
M&M Chicken and Waffles, just north of Washington, is half-full on midday Friday. A soap opera plays on the mounted television while people dine on varying versions of the namesake items. Tim Gilmore wondered if a chicken-and-waffle eatery (popularized by Roscoe’s in LA) could make it on MLK Boulevard. His is the fifth soul-food restaurant in this space in seven years. Gilmore, who also owns M&M Soul Food Café on Valley View and Charleston, says opening shop here felt right. “We started in the ’hood in LA, so this is where the restaurant is supposed to be. I couldn’t visualize it anywhere else,” he says. “There’s no better way to support King’s legacy than operating a business on his street.”
At the corner of Owens and MLK sits the headquarters of Cox Communications. Before Cox moved in, the facility housed a VA ambulatory care center. The Department of Veterans Affairs closed the 187,000-square-foot hospital nearly 10 years ago, after it was beset by structural problems and space constraints. Joe Neal, who served 32 years in the state Senate, says the street’s reputation helped seal the center’s fate. Vets told federal officials they were scared to come there. “These are men who fought in wars saying this.”
A time or two, my nerve deserts me as I walk MLK at night. I tense up when I see groups of guys, or if cars slowly roll by. I feel vulnerable. I spend time in the tough ’hoods, trying to stay connected to the streets. But I drive in, mingle, then leave. Walking makes you feel bare. All you’ve got are your hands, feet and wits. I’m not sure what I think might happen. Have I, too, bought into the hype?
On weekend mornings, the Lake Mead-MLK intersection is alive with action. Bow-tied Nation of Islam members selling incense and bean pies. Kids (two at a time; store rules) trolling the CVS aisles for candy. Occasionally family and friends collect money to bury the slain. This night, I see a homeless man asleep on the wall in front of Jack in the Box. I walk the intersection. West to the CAT bus stop, south to McDonald’s, east to Mario’s Westside Market—thick with customers buying catfish and pig’s feet—and north back to Jack in the Box to complete the circuit. Years ago, a friend nearly got carjacked at this intersection. I’m ready to go.
I perform the same four-corner ritual at Owens and MLK. Traffic at the convenience stores on the northeast and southeast corners is constant. A rapper who says he’s from Milwaukee hustles CDs. Customers buy beer and ask for Swisher Sweets cigars, popular among the weed-smoking set (empty the cigar, insert marijuana, roll it, lick to seal the contents and light up). Cops have detained a group of teens outside the government-subsidized Marble Manor Annex just north of Owens.
Over on Carey and MLK, I warily trek to the now-shuttered Buena Vista Springs Apartments. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development closed the place down last year due to safety violations. Buena Vista was the epicenter of a 2001 gang war that claimed 16 lives. Since the rival neighborhood is only blocks away, I beat it across the street to marvel at the soon-to-open William Pearson Community Center, named after one of Nevada’s first black dentists.
Worried that its perception might finally match the peril, I make quick work of the Washington-MLK nexus: Lots of red-clad men (this is Bloods territory) roam the Marble Manor complex neighboring the Andre Agassi Boys & Girls Club. Nothing happens on my trips. I feel a bit guilty for expecting the worst.
Lamentable things do occur on MLK. King would probably be disappointed that the ground has yet to be broken on the Urban Chamber of Commerce building, that the FBI (which relentlessly tailed him) has a huge headquarters just north of the street, that furniture stores compose the main commerce south of Bonanza.
Earlier in the day, at Agassi, I see something that would’ve brightened King’s day: Kids of various ethnicities practicing their serves. I suspect he’d find also pride in the Prentiss Walker Memorial Pool, where thousands of black children have learned how to swim. In neighboring Hispanic and black churches (Iglesia de Cristo and Alpha and Omega Ministries) near Cartier. In the multiracial make-up of businesses at D&L Plaza (a Chinese nail shop and black and Hispanic churches). In the glut of enterprise from Cheyenne to Craig. I’m heartened, too. I think MLK Boulevard represents the promise of King’s dream.
“The neighborhoods aren’t bad because of the street name,” says Claytee White, director of UNLV’s Oral History Research Center. “There’s no correlation whatsoever” between King and what happens on his so-named streets. These streets tend to run through areas that are impoverished and where people have lost jobs and have moved out. We shouldn’t try to say that his legacy is no different from his street.”
Delores Grant is photographing the King statue. Snap. Snap. She wants to show the folks back home in Alexandria, Virginia, what a King bust should look like. The man who brought her here, Montez Eleazer, a 20-year resident, peruses the King quotes inscribed on four small brick walls surrounding the bust. The one in front of him says,
“We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.” I point to the mini-mart. One of the men, the taller one, is sitting on a trash can, drinking. Were he here today, wouldn’t King gently rebuke him?
“No,” Eleazer says. “The undesirables are part of society. They’ll always be with us.” King would appeal to their sense of humanity, he says. Loving the sinner but hating the sin.
“There’s nothing wrong with having a drink,” Grant adds. “What happens is folks drink a whole fifth of liquor. Nobody told you to do that. If black people stopped complaining and started cleaning up their communities, then we could make King’s streets something to be proud of.”
Damon Hodge is a Weekly staff writer.