The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power

Chapter 11, “St. Louis,” examines the reputation and condition of American streets named after civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK). The chapter begins with a brief description of a speech given by King in St. Louis in 1958. King congratulates the people of St. Louis for their progress in desegregation and calls for leaders to step up and guide the city through the ongoing work in race relations.

Mask then moves to modern-day St. Louis to introduce Melvin White. White, an African American native of St. Louis, grew up on MLK Drive in a time when the street was the center of a thriving Black community. However, as years passed and white residents and city funding moved to the suburbs, MLK Drive has become a less desirable location, with drug dealers and sex workers replacing shuttered businesses. Inspired by a nearby street that had undergone extensive gentrification, White founded an organization called Beloved Streets of America dedicated to improving communities surrounding streets named after MLK.

The majority of streets named for Martin Luther King, Jr., are in Black neighborhoods. Following King’s assassination in 1968, cities around the world, from Haarlem in the Netherlands to Mainz, West Germany, moved quickly to name streets in his honor. In King’s hometown of Atlanta, on the other hand, it took eight years for an MLK street to appear. Since his assassination, attempts to memorialize King through street names have often been met with violence. As recently as 2005, the Department of Justice was forced to intervene in a contentious debate about MLK streets in Muncie, Indiana. Violent debates about MLK streets have emerged even in supposedly progressive cities like Austin, Texas; and Portland, Oregon.

Mask shows that, as a result of Jim Crow housing policies and segregation, Black communities in St. Louis and elsewhere in the South have been intentionally denied resources. Accordingly, she argues, MLK streets are likely to be in neighborhoods that are both primarily Black and underfunded. For many Americans, streets named after MLK have become associated with Black communities, gaining the nickname “Black America’s Main Street.” The goal of Beloved Communities of America is to restore these main streets to their former glory through educational programs, distribution of resources, and volunteer labor.

White has received support from prominent members of the St. Louis community and researchers at Harvard University, although the project still has a long way to go before White’s goals are realized. Mask concludes the chapter by suggesting that, for many people, streets named after Martin Luther King will always be associated with Blackness, and will therefore always be considered “bad” streets, regardless of the work and resources poured into them.

The section on “Race” concludes with Chapter 12, “South Africa,” which explores contemporary debates over South African street names. Mask introduces the concept of apartheid, the legalized segregation of races that characterized South African government from 1948 until the country’s first multiracial election in 1994. Under apartheid, Black South Africans were forced out of their homes and into underfunded townships, where they were sent to separate schools and forbidden from working in specific jobs. Resistance to apartheid was organized by the African National Congress (ANC), led by Nelson Mandela.

Mask describes a court case heard by the Constitutional Court of South Africa in 2007. Government officials in Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa, had proposed changing the names of 27 streets honoring Afrikaners, the white descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa whose government was responsible for apartheid policies. The proposed street names were intended to honor members of the ANC who had fought to end apartheid.

AfriForum, which describes itself as a civil rights organization for Afrikaners, filed a lawsuit to prevent these name changes, arguing that residents had not been given sufficient time to debate the change. Although the Constitutional Court ultimately dismissed the case, the decision fell along racial lines, with the Court’s two white justices dissenting. In their dissent, the white justices questioned whether there was a place for Afrikaners in post-apartheid South Africa.

Mask explores the history of apartheid South Africa and the Afrikaners, suggesting that apartheid policies were the result of the Afrikaners’ fear of losing power. She notes that the first white settlers came to South Africa with the Dutch East Indian Company in the 17th century. They established farming communities along the coast, which thrived until the arrival of the British in the 19th century. British troops forced the Dutch to move inland: Between 1835 and 1846, approximately 15,000 Afrikaners were relocated. However, when the British discovered diamonds and gold in these new territories, the conflict escalated to war. Nearly 26,000 Afrikaners died in the Boer (Afrikaans for “farmer”) Wars with Britain; Mask argues that the conflict established the idea that the Afrikaners were “survivors, a chosen people” (211). Mask suggests that, after the British left South Africa, the Afrikaners, who were a small majority, moved quickly to secure power over the Black majority.

When Nelson Mandela became President after the fall of the apartheid government in 1994, he rejected activists’ calls to change street names honoring Afrikaners in order to preserve the tenuous peace. His successor, Thabo Mbkei, on the other hand, changed over 800 street names, including 400 containing a racial slur. Some of these name changes were controversial, as in the street named for ANC activist Andrew Zondo, who detonated a bomb that killed five people. For AfriForum and other Afrikaner activists, these street names are destabilizing and destressing signs that Black South Africans feel a great deal of anger towards their white counterparts.

Mask ends the chapter with an excerpt from a Constitutional Court dissent in which a white justice included a call to action in Afrikaans, calling for fellow Afrikaners to publicly separate the language from the apartheid government.