35. A Highway By Any Other Name (redux)

About three weeks ago I addressed my views on which street, if any, in Jefferson County, should be renamed to honor the life and memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King's specific ties to Louisville are few. He visited here on several occassions and his brother, the Reverend A. D. Williams King, was pastor of the Zion Church at 22nd and Muhammad Ali Boulevard. But, while his specific ties to Louisville are few, his contributions to the ongoing work of civil rights are many. I believe something more than a closed right-of-way in front of the Mazzoli Federal Building, a post office branch on W. Broadway, and an elementary school in the west end, should bear his name.

The local governing authority, the Louisville - Jefferson County Metro Council, leapt into this discussion at the beginning of the year, with a proposal to rename 22nd Street (some or all) for Dr. King. That proposal met with opposition from various corners, including residents of the working class (and mostly white) neighborhood of Portland, for which 22nd serves as one of several north-south corridors. Simultaneous with the Council's action, State Senator Gerald Neal (my senator, as I live in his district) introduced a measure in the recently convened General Assembly to name (not rename) I-65 in Jefferson County for Dr. King. [Maybe, I should say rename, as I-65 was in the past known by two names for its two parts, the North-South Expressway and the Kentucky Turnpike, which was a predecessor road between Elizabethtown and Louisville which was incorporated into the interstate system as it developed]. The Council, showing their mettle in handling difficult issues, voted 26-0 (imagine that) to not handle this matter, endorsing instead Senator Neal's idea for I-65, rather than having one of their own.

There have been discussions that I-65 was "overdoing it" arguing that King's associations with Louisville did not merit the naming of the main north-south artery. In my January 15th post, I indicated I wasn't sure I agreed with Senator Neal's idea. Now comes State Senator Danny Seum's proposal to name the entirety of I-65 within the Commonwealth for Abraham Lincoln, whose 198th birthday rolls around Monday, a day we used to take as a holiday, both in the Commonwealth and the Republic. The argument to name 65 for Lincoln is strong. The highway passes within fifteen miles of Lincoln's birthplace, a National Historic Site, complete with a log cabin at one time said to be the cabin in which the 16th president was born, and steps leading into the park for each of the president's 56 years of age. Moreover, Lincoln's service as president was wholy marked by the divisive Civil War, and very few places lived through the divisiveness as did Kentucky. Troop movements into and out of Kentucky followed both I-65 (or, more specifically the L & N Railroad) and I-75 (or more specifically the old Wilderness Road along US 25). Many significant sites along I-65 have strong ties to the Civil War, the Lincoln presidency, and Lincoln himself. Nearly every exit off of 65 can lead to some site with some Lincoln significance.

The timing of Senator Seum's proposal is, perhaps, suspect. He has been in the Senate for many years, representing at one time or another nearly all of Jefferson County south of the Watterson, as well as Bullitt County for an extended period. Interstate 65 bisects both counties and runs just to the east of the Senator's farmstead in the Coral Ridge community south of Fairdale. Seum was a Democrat when first elected, but after the gift of a tie from United States Senator Mitch McConnell, he switched over to the Dark Side of the Aisle. He used to also be much more of a libertarian than he is now, but he remains basically a populist. He has allowed his views to shift well to the right over his terms of office. Despite these strong ideological swings, Danny and I have been and remain friends and I respect, even when disagreeing, the work he does in Frankfort. His southern Jefferson County constituents do as well (my mother is one of them) as he easily won reelection in 2006.

If I had to choose between the two proposals, I would, in all likelihood, go with Senator Seum's, as it is more representative of Kentucky's past. But, I always find it interesting that when any member of the current right-wing xenophobic Republican Party wants to display their concern for civil and human rights, they have to go back at least 40 years to the Civil Rights passages of the 1960s, or more often 140 years to their first president, Kentucky's Abraham Lincoln to do so. There is certainly no one of this caliber in today's GOP.