What's in a Name - Honoring Martin Luther King Jr’s Legacy with a Physical Presence in Anchorage
Alaska, in general, is made up of many moments and histories that often truly captured in newspaper traffic. Thinking of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. today, I was reminded, unfortunately, of the 1980s Anchorage controversy surrounding the naming of the new Performing Arts Center after him and the following history of naming something in Anchorage in his honour after all.
According to Project 80s and the Reshaping of Anchorage, “During construction, a naming committee consisting of city leaders and community members proposed that the new performing arts center bear the name of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. After nine months of debate, the Assembly voted 10–1 in September 1986 to affix King’s name to the new venue. However, a backlash against naming the center after Martin Luther King Jr. emerged within Anchorage’s white conservative community. They felt his name did not merit attachment to a public building in the city.”
Several activists appealed the Assembly’s decision and gathered the required signatures to put the question before voters. In October 1987, a majority of Anchorage residents overruled the Assembly and voted to remove Dr. King’s name. Since then, the building has been known as the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts. The controversy laid bare long-standing questions about race, civil rights, and who was considered worthy of public recognition in Anchorage. It also suggested that Project 80s redevelopment efforts were, at their root, intended to appeal to a predominantly white, middle-class population that had recently relocated to the city.
While working on a larger project about the Ku Klux Klan in Alaska (the first edition of that paper is public here: http://hdl.handle.net/11122/16282), I came across a 1987 article titled “KKK Claims 1,500 Members.” The article discussed how naming the Performing Arts Center after Dr. King may have provided an opportunity for the Klan and other white supremacist groups to use the issue as a rallying point.
Mayoral Candidate of Anchorage, Dave Walsh, had actually received a letter a week before the Municipal Election from someone who claimed to be a local Klan leader. While the contents of the letter included slurs, and threats of violence, it also focused on Walsh’s position of NOT wanting to remove Martin Luther King Jr's name from the Performing Arts Center. The Klan threatened that if he did not change his position they would ensure he would not win the mayoral race.
In October 1987, during the voter referendum, 73% of voters rejected the name. The following month, Walsh did lose the mayoral election to Tom Fink, who won with 57% of the vote; a margin of just 7,150 votes. In the article about the letter Walsh receive in '87, U.S. Attorney Michael Spaan said he turned the threatening letter over to the FBI, who claimed they never received it; The letter was ultimately considered lost. Spaan stated that if it were recovered, an investigation would be opened, but to this day I have not found any follow-up indicating that the letter was ever located. (This is, notably, this is possibly the second time in Anchorage’s history that a mayoral candidate was threatened by the KKK without any documented resolution; the first being in 1929.)
While the discussion about naming the Performing Arts Center went on for quite a bit, different camps of thinking formed. Between those absolutely for and those vehemently against; There were a number of citizens in Anchorage who felt that Dr. King deserved recognition, but that a performing arts center was not the right fit, arguing he deserved something more meaningful or aligned with his vision.
In January 1986, the Anchorage Daily News asked readers, “What public facility should be named for Dr. Martin Luther King?” Suggestions ranged widely: a mountain in the Chugach range, schools, a university building, a community park, to the Sullivan Arena, the airport, and even the garbage dump. (The garbage dump suggestion, to be fair, was made sarcastically in response to racist commentary in the community at the time around this issue. The writer explained it would be “a place where people will rid their racial prejudices and hatreds.”)
Prior to the Performing Arts Center controversy, Gov. Bill Sheffield had appointed a committee to name something in honour after Dr. King. Eventually there was an idea to rename 9th street in his honour, but that was met with more backlash than expected. Julia O’Malley wrote in 2010 for the Anchorage Daily News, “Some of the neighbors came un-glued. In a town where my grandad, a grumpy chain-smoking white guy, could get a road and two peaks named after him for basically no reason, people complained renaming the road for a civil-rights hero would interrupt ‘the historic integrity of the alphanumeric system’ of downtown streets. Here's a more telling quote from the opposition in an old news story: ‘What are we trying to do? I never did admire him that much any-how,’ Evelyn Boeke, one of the most vocal opponents at the time, said about King. ‘I am not against colored people, I've got a lot of good colored friends. But I don't think they should try to take over Anchorage.’ (Incidentally, Ben Boeke Ice Arena was named for Evelyn's husband, a long-serving city clerk who never actually played hockey.) Anyway, once Ninth Avenue failed the Assembly decided to name what became the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts after King … then all kinds of nastiness started.”
As stated earlier, the Assembly vote in September of '86 was 10-1 and originally the Performing Arts center was named after him, then in the following year a referendum vote took place and voters voted to remove his name from the building.
As summarized from Ian Hartman’s “Black History in the Last Frontier” for our paper “ALASKKKA - The Invisible Empire in the Last Frontier A Look into the 1920s Klan of the North”; Conservative residents, led by former assemblyman Don Smith, organized over 500 supporters to oppose the name, arguing it favored the Black community and was unrepresentative of the city. They gathered over 11,000 petition signatures, double the required amount, forcing the assembly to remove King’s name pending a citywide referendum. Smith suggested that the Fairview community center, in a historically Black neighborhood, would be a more appropriate tribute, claiming King did not deserve citywide recognition. In October 1987, voters rejected naming the arts center after King by a 3-to-1 margin. The debate grew heated, with one assembly member remarking that he had heard the “N-Word” more in THREE WEEKS than in the previous 25 years of his life!
A lot of the more racially motivated commentary from the against crowd even drew the attention of David Duke. Directly from the book,
“One month after the referendum, the Ku Klux Klan, emboldened by the city’s decision to reject King’s name, opened a recruiting office in town. This was the second time in the decade that the hate group attempted to set up shop in Alaska. David Duke, a former Louisiana politician and a Grand Wizard of the Klan, viewed Alaska as a potential recruiting ground. Duke claimed that white Alaskans would be receptive to his ideas since ‘you have a lot of Native interest groups up there and a lot of whites have a growing seed of concern because of the favoritism that’s being shown [to] some of these Indian and Eskimo organizations.’ Duke proposed an Alaska chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP) to ‘preserve the white race and white heritage;’ otherwise Duke feared, ‘we’re going to resemble a Third World country instead of the United States that we used to have.’ While Duke’s effort to establish a NAAWP in Alaska failed, the controversy over the naming of the performing arts center further disturbed the racial fault lines that have characterized Alaska throughout much of its history.”
Despite all of this, Black life in Alaska has continued on, if not thrive in some cities. African Americans have made claims here like any other pioneers, carving out spaces, building communities, and shaping Alaska’s history. The Black Lives in Alaska exhibit at the Anchorage Museum powerfully reflected that legacy; from Black Whalers in the 1800s through to Entrepreneurs and Civic Leaders of Anchorage's community today.
In the 1990s, Dr. Alonzo B. Patterson Jr. envisioned a permanent Alaskan memorial honoring the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In 1995, he founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Foundation of Alaska and organized a Living Memorial Committee, which raised more than $250,000 to build the Martin Luther King Jr. Living Memorial on the Delaney Park strip along 9th Avenue.
Originally dedicated in June 1998 in conjunction with Juneteenth, the memorial featured a brick plaza, with a bronze bust of Dr. King created by artist Jerome Meadows, and a series of interpretive panels. These panels combine King’s words and images from his life/work with the histories of Alaska Native rights and Black civil rights in America, weaving a broader narrative of civil rights in Alaska that also highlights contributions from Hispanic, Filipino, and Chinese community members to Alaska’s history. Images and full text of the interpretive panels can be found here: https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=254221
About a decade after the monument was first installed at the Delaney Park strip, Anchorage took another step toward honoring Dr. King with physical landmarks.
In 2008, then–Mayor Mark Begich used an executive order to name a future stretch of roadway south of Tudor Road in Dr. King’s honor. Two years later, in 2010, the City of Anchorage officially dedicated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, which runs roughly parallel to Tudor, connecting Boniface and Elmore. This time, there was far less public backlash than in earlier attempts. Despite the rain, a long lineup of speakers and presenters took part, and just over 100 community members gathered as the audience. For many, the dedication felt like a long-awaited moment of collective healing in the community, one that had been 25 years in the making since the original 9th street renaming proposal.
In 2012, following restoration and renewed community investment, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Living Memorial was recognized as the northernmost Dr. King memorial in the United States. Renovation efforts, led by Dr. Patterson in partnership with the Anchorage Park Foundation, culminated in a rededication of the site, which now features a laser-etched granite image of Dr. King along with improved park space surrounding the memorial.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day became official at the federal level in 1983 when President Reagan signed the bill, with the first national observance in 1986. Alaska followed with state efforts in the late 1980s; Though it took an additional three-year struggle for Alaska to adopt his birthday as a state holiday in 1989, after Gov. Steve Cowper issued executive orders the prior two years. Today will be about the 37th year of observance in Alaska.
In Article from the 1998 Dedication to the Memorial at the Delaney Park Strip, the Anchorage Daily News wrote, "Martin Luther King Jr. will be formally recognized with a special place in Anchorage. But he should not be confined to the park strip. The most important place for Martin Luther King is in our hearts."
The Northern Lights have seen Queer sights but the Queerest they ever did see Was on the marge of lake LeBarge, where I cremated sam McGee.
