{"id":671,"date":"2005-08-04T17:49:45","date_gmt":"2005-08-04T22:49:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ibiblio.org\/pjones\/wordpress\/?p=671"},"modified":"2005-08-04T19:53:59","modified_gmt":"2005-08-05T00:53:59","slug":"mlk-boulevard-the-concrete-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/mlk-boulevard-the-concrete-dream\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;MLK Boulevard: The Concrete Dream"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.twotownsofjasper.com\/filmmakers.html\">Marco Williams<\/a> (who also made <a href=\"http:\/\/www.twotownsofjasper.com\/\">&#8220;Two Towns of Jasper&#8221;<\/a>) was in <a href=\"http:\/\/cds.aas.duke.edu\/events\/concretedreams.html\">Durham for a showing<\/a> of his &#8220;MLK Boulevard: The Concrete Dream&#8221; at <a href=\"http:\/\/cds.aas.duke.edu\/\">the Center for Documentary Studies<\/a> last night. Tucker and I went over to see him.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www2.eugeneweekly.com\/2003\/070303news.html#news1\">The MLK Blvd story<\/a> is a familiar one to us as Sally had worked hard on the renaming one of Chapel Hill&#8217;s main roads to MLK Blvd. As <a href=\"http:\/\/www.yogi-berra.com\/\">Yogi<\/a> would say, it was deja vu all over again as we watched the drama of road renaming play out in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eugene-or.gov\/\">Eugene Oregon<\/a>. The same arguments, the same substitutions offered, the same talk about process. Only Council person Bettman in Eugene stepped up and was strong enough to read King&#8217;s words on the subject to her fellows on Council as they claimed that the cost of stationary was too great to allow for renaming or claimed that they had a more &#8220;creative and unique idea&#8221; like naming the library or a park.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.registerguard.com\/news\/2003\/06\/11\/a1.boycott.0611.html\">The vote in Eugene was 6 against the naming and 2 for.<\/a><br \/>\nMarco visited MLK Blvds, Sts, Rds, and more around the country to see what was happening there. Great visits with interesting people including one dirt road that ends at a trailer house where a delightful and cranky admirer of MLK lives.<br \/>\nBack in Eugene, Marco visits the various business people who talk about the hardship of change in carefully coded language.<br \/>\nOne more direct merchant, Ed of Ed&#8217;s Warehouse, says he will shutdown his appliance business if the road in front is renamed. During part of the discussion, Ed tells Marco that Marco is &#8220;thinking like a black person.&#8221; Ahem. . Camera pans to Marco. Marco has long long dreadlocks and is, well, a black person. Camera pans to Marco. Ed tries to say well I want you to see it my way, but he can&#8217;t quite express himself clearly on that.<br \/>\nAfter a period of aggitation and of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.registerguard.com\/news\/2003\/06\/11\/ed.edit.mlk.0611.html\">editorial writing<\/a>, the Council decided to revisit the renaming vote. <a href=\"http:\/\/publish.portland.indymedia.org\/en\/2003\/06\/266295.shtml\">This time the vote was 5 &#8211; 3 for the renaming.<\/a><br \/>\nMany other stories in this 54 minute film that was made for limitied cable release on the NYTimes\/Discovery channel.<\/p>\n<p>[links etc later]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Marco Williams (who also made &#8220;Two Towns of Jasper&#8221;) was in Durham for a showing of his &#8220;MLK Boulevard: The Concrete Dream&#8221; at the Center for Documentary Studies last night. Tucker and I went over to see him. The MLK Blvd story is a familiar one to us as Sally had worked hard on the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alumni-and-other-friends","category-amusements","category-general","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}