Cooper: Selective unity on M.L. King Day

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MLK mural praised as community anchor

Photo Gallery

Community pitches in on King Day service projects

If the Unity Group which had sponsored local Martin Luther King Jr. parades for 46 years felt used and put upon when details didn't perfectly fall into line for this year's event, group members nevertheless should have accepted the city's offer of help, hosted the parade as usual, then sat down with city officials in the coming weeks to air their grievances.

As it is, the group looked exclusionary and un-King-like - and hardly lived up to its name - when declaring it would not host, participate in or endorse Monday's parade, which the city offered to make happen after the group canceled the parade Friday.

In return for the offer, the Unity Group said the city was orchestrating "a deliberate and hostile takeover" of the parade and called it a "despicable authoritarian and totalitarian tactic."

The city, with an offer to secure barricades and whatever additional items were needed, just wanted what "is an important event for so many in Chattanooga" to go on as planned.

Fortunately, hundreds were able to march in the sunny but frigid weather down North Moore Road to Brainerd High School, the route city officials said the Unity Group had planned, and celebrate the life of the civil rights leader.

This year's route was a change from previous parades down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard because, according to the group, "the street that bears his namesake no longer represents the epicenter of Chattanooga's African-American community as businesses, churches, homes and schools have rapidly dissipated from this once-thriving urban core under the guise of urban planning, renewal and outright gentrification."

The Unity Group further stated "these communal vices" [of urban planning, renewal and outright gentrification] have led to "rapidly decaying social conditions and psychological conditions that can be defined as maltreated, malnourished and maladjusted."

It's true that M.L. King Boulevard no longer resembles the Ninth Street it once was. But it was last Ninth Street some 30 years ago, and even then the street was nothing like its heyday of decades earlier when it was what the group called "a thriving urban core."

Well before University of Tennessee at Chattanooga housing started moving down toward the street, before the Bessie Smith Hall wound up anchoring one end of the community and before retail establishments began creeping back into the area, it had become a bar-heavy, crime-ridden stretch of largely run-down buildings.

If anything, the transformation of the area kept more people from being "maltreated, malnourished and maladjusted."

Going forward, whether the hitches in this year's parade involved foot-dragging on the part of the Unity Group or "retaliation [by the city] because of our speakers" - one speaker last year was President Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who in the past, among other things, asked God to damn America - is water under the bridge.

What should happen now is a meeting between the city and the Unity Group in which differences are aired and an even more inclusive event planned for 2017. Indeed, both the city and the organization share the same goal - for Chattanooga to celebrate the freedoms hard fought for and won by King and other civil rights leaders.

Fortunately, Monday's holiday celebrating King in Chattanooga did include a variety of events in the spirit of the minister who once very nearly became the pastor of the city's First Baptist Church (East Eighth Street). All around the city, many took part in a day of service, using either their work day or their day off to help paint, patch or fix - in the M.L. King neighborhood and elsewhere - so that the lives of some Chattanoogans might be a little brighter.

Perhaps the highlight, though, was the dedication of the giant mural, called "We Will Not Be Satisfied Until," that nearly circles the AT&T building on M.L. King Boulevard. The 42,179-square-foot mural, which depicts 20 past or present people who represent aspects of the street and of Chattanooga, centers on black history and the evolution of the neighborhood.

The event brought out black and white, rich and poor, powerful and unconnected, and speakers who talked about the mural's "importance of connecting people," of its ability to tell "stories of people and places in the city," and of the event's significance as "what's best about our city" - that we can "all come together and seek a better day for all."

After all, as King himself said, "We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."