ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the kind of oppositional politics of belonging that animates debates over street naming, thus elucidating broader political struggles over the right to the city. It offers a case study to explore African American struggles to reshape the identity of urban streetscapes, the contours of social memory, and larger sense of political membership and social inclusion. (Re)naming roads for Martin Luther King, Jr. is especially important in African American efforts to rewrite the US commemorative toponymic landscape. In applying a spatial justice framework to street naming, it is important to consider the intra-urban location of toponym and how the appropriation and production of urban space through naming is situated in relation to wider geographical distributions of people, wealth, and transportation within cities. A procedural or participatory justice perspective would address the factors that limit the full participation of African Americans in local government decisions about whether to name a street for King and which specific street to rename.
