Every year, as the third Monday in January approaches, I feel the same unease settle in. I prepare myself for a week of service and celebration and for the familiar sanitizing of a man much of America still hasn’t fully reckoned with. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. becomes safer in death, his words trimmed down to what’s comfortable, his legacy folded neatly into a holiday.
That tension stayed with me in 2022, during my days at the News Sentinel, and it pushed me toward the questions I couldn’t shake, yet they were deceptively simple: How did this street get Dr. King’s name? Who decided? Who fought for it? And why here? What does it really mean to honor King in the places where Black life continues anyway? The answer, I found, ran straight through Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in East Knoxville.
I had driven it often, like most people who have lived or worked on the east side. The road is familiar, known more by feel than by thought. It rises from Dandridge at Mt. Olive on the hill, cuts through Five Points, passes churches that have long anchored the community, and moves past Black-owned institutions like WJBE radio and Jarnigan & Son Mortuary before stretching into Burlington, where Lema’s Famous Chitlins still stands in a bright red building. It’s also a place where potholes crowd the pavement, and front-porch conversations stretch past sundown. For many, it’s not a symbolic road. It is a place where Black life continues, day after day on King streets across America, enduring decades of disinvestment beneath a name that promised justice long before cities were ready to deliver it…