Every year, as the third Monday in January approaches, I feel the same unease settle in. I prepare myself for a week of service and celebration and for the familiar sanitizing of a man much of America still hasn’t fully reckoned with. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. becomes safer in death, his words trimmed down to what’s comfortable, his legacy folded neatly into a holiday.
That tension stayed with me in 2022, during my days at the News Sentinel, and it pushed me toward the questions I couldn’t shake, yet they were deceptively simple: How did this street get Dr. King’s name? Who decided? Who fought for it? And why here? What does it really mean to honor King in the places where Black life continues anyway? The answer, I found, ran straight through Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in East Knoxville.
I had driven it often, like most people who have lived or worked on the east side. The road is familiar, known more by feel than by thought. It rises from Dandridge at Mt. Olive on the hill, cuts through Five Points, passes churches that have long anchored the community, and moves past Black-owned institutions like WJBE radio and Jarnigan & Son Mortuary before stretching into Burlington, where Lema’s Famous Chitlins still stands in a bright red building. It’s also a place where potholes crowd the pavement, and front-porch conversations stretch past sundown. For many, it’s not a symbolic road. It is a place where Black life continues, day after day on King streets across America, enduring decades of disinvestment beneath a name that promised justice long before cities were ready to deliver it.
But familiarity has a way of hiding history.
Once I started asking questions, I realized how much of Knoxville’s public memory rests on stories we assume we already know and how much disappears when we don’t stop to look closer.
Once East Vine
Before it was Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, it was East Vine, a street shaped by segregation, redlining, and urban renewal, but also by Black life in all its fullness.
East Vine used to be called “Black Broadway,” and it ran through the heart of East Knoxville.
Robert J. Booker penned many columns about the history along Vine and I always found it fascinating. In a column about the old Dogan Gaither Motel, he wrote,
“East Vine Avenue was in the heart of the Black Business District. It catered to the entertainers at the Gem Theatre, the Elks Rest, the Workers Club, and Chilhowee Park. It later had clients who performed at the Civic Coliseum. Noted Black speakers for church programs also stayed there, as well as ordinary visitors to the city.”
And I think about Nikki Giovanni’s memories of growing up nearby, too. In 400 Mulvaney, Giovanni recalled, Vine Street “through sound and sensation, jazz pouring from Carter-Roberts Drug Store, neighbors dressed sharply for church, nickels dropped into jukeboxes, and the rhythms of Black life that unfolded block by block.”
As I dug through archives, East Vine appeared over and over again. So when I learned that East Vine would eventually be renamed for Dr. King, it became clear that the decision was never just about honoring a man. It was about where Black history was allowed to live in public space.
The renaming effort
As I traced the renaming effort through records and archives, one name surfaced early and then seemed to disappear.
Charles Mathes.
He wasn’t the name associated with the official renaming of Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue. That credit had largely gone to Rev. Harold Middlebrook, Charlene Lewis, Anna Dirl, and others who successfully pushed the effort across the finish line in 1989. But Mathes’ name appeared earlier, attached to an initial push that didn’t succeed.
The more I looked, the more intrigued I became.
Mathes passed away in 2014 and was a respected educator at Austin High School and later Austin-East High School, where generations of Black students passed through his classrooms. He was a teacher, a mentor, and someone who I learned understood education not just as instruction, but as preparation for civic life. As I asked around about him, I learned how much he was really loved.
And yet, when I went digging through records looking for more about him, it thinned quickly. There were photos. A few brief mentions. No long profiles. No sweeping retrospectives. No easy narrative arc.
That absence felt telling.
For someone who had helped push Knoxville to consider honoring Dr. King and who had shaped young lives as an educator, Charles Mathes had largely slipped through the cracks of the archives.
His effort came earlier, at a time when Knoxville was even less willing to publicly reckon with Black history and protest. The federal holiday honoring King hadn’t even been established yet. The national consensus around King’s legacy was still contested. Locally, the political will simply wasn’t there.
Through my years of research and reporting, I have learned that civil rights history is full of people who push early, whose ideas are right, but the timing or circumstances cost them visibility. When I think of Mathes, I think of Claudette Colvin: the first to refuse to give up her seat on a bus, before Rosa Parks, whose courage came before the country was ready to listen. We tend to remember the victories but forget the first attempts.
When I later spoke with Rev. Harold Middlebrook, he made sure to say Mathes’ name. He acknowledged his role plainly, without qualification. In his telling, the story of MLK Avenue wasn’t about a single figure, but about persistence across time.
When the Moment Finally Arrived
By the late 1980s, the political landscape had shifted, not dramatically, but enough.
National pressure was building to formally recognize Dr. King. The federal holiday became official in 1983, signed into law by President Reagan. The framing of King had softened in ways that made white acceptance easier.
Middlebrook, a civil rights leader with personal ties to King through their shared time at Morehouse College, became a central figure in the renewed effort. This time, the campaign was visible and collective.
Charlene Lewis shared with me that there was still pushback from some local business owners who weren’t comfortable having an MLK address.
But they canvassed along East Vine Avenue, gathering signatures. Hundreds were collected. City council meetings followed, and objections echoed patterns seen nationwide whenever King’s name was proposed for public space.
Eventually, the council approved the change during Victor Ashe’s tenure.
In 1989, East Vine Avenue officially became Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, stretching roughly three miles through East Knoxville. It stopped short of downtown.
A Pattern Beyond Knoxville
As my reporting continued, it became clear that Knoxville’s story fit into a much larger national pattern.
That’s when I got to know Derek Alderman, a University of Tennessee geographer whose research has tracked Martin Luther King Jr. street naming across the United States for more than two decades. Alderman estimates there are more than 1,000 streets named for Dr. King worldwide, including at least 955 in the United States across 41 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
Tennessee has at least 17 streets bearing King’s name, stretching across the state’s largest cities and extending into smaller rural communities, such as Bolivar, New Market and Rockwood, sometimes no more than narrow back roads, absent from Google Maps and quietly maintained by residents determined to ensure King’s name remains visible.
King’s name, he explains, is often placed in historically Black neighborhoods not by accident, but because those corridors tend to face the least resistance. The symbolism is celebrated, while deeper questions about investment and equity are left unanswered.
He was quick to tell me who is often behind the effort: “None of this happens without Black activism. Black communities, Black clergy, and those who have pushed very hard to get King’s name on a prominent road,” Alderman shared with me.
Knoxville was no exception.
‘What comes next but never gets here’
As I talked with Joe Armstrong, he reminded me that the story of Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in East Knoxville isn’t really a cautionary tale about a name. It’s a story about broken promises and stalled projects that long predate the street sign. That thought challenged me to think about it differently.
Armstrong, the longtime owner of WJBE Radio, located his station on MLK years after the street had already been renamed. By then, he said, the conditions people now associate with the corridor were already deeply rooted. Disinvestment had begun decades earlier, after urban renewal dismantled East Knoxville’s economic anchors and hollowed out neighborhoods that had once supported a mix of Black-owned businesses, churches, grocery stores, and neighborhood schools.
“Changing the name didn’t change the trajectory,” Armstrong told me. “The trajectory was already set.”
It was part of a broader unraveling. MLK didn’t fall alone; Magnolia Avenue declined right alongside it.
Armstrong is just as critical of what came after new businesses arrived. Over the years, he’s watched a familiar pattern take hold along MLK and across East Knoxville: businesses operating in the community without truly investing in it. Many owners don’t live nearby. They don’t hire local residents. And the money they make rarely circulates back into the neighborhood.
He stopped short of placing blame on any one group, but he was clear about the outcome. What looks like development on paper often amounts to economic extraction, money coming in and leaving just as fast.
“That’s not entirely their fault,” he said. “That’s our fault for continuing to support businesses that aren’t committed to reinvestment in the community.”
The result, Armstrong explained, is a corridor where opportunity remains thin even as commerce exists. Jobs don’t materialize. Ownership doesn’t change hands. Wealth doesn’t stay put. And without those pieces, even longstanding businesses struggle to survive.
To Armstrong, that reality stands in direct tension with what Dr. King actually fought for. King’s vision, he reminded me, was never just moral; it was economic. It centered Black businesses hiring locally, neighbors spending money where they live, and communities building wealth from the inside out.
“When people spend outside their community, that money is gone,” he said. “And when businesses come in just to extract and not reinvest, the community stays poor.”
Despite the narrative that often surrounds it, Armstrong rejects the idea that MLK Boulevard is unsafe or unviable. In fact, he said, it’s one of the most closely monitored corridors in the city. What it lacks isn’t potential, it’s intention. Policies that encourage local hiring. Incentives that reward reinvestment. Development strategies that treat East Knoxville as worthy of the same imagination afforded downtown.
To truly honor King’s legacy, Armstrong believes cities have to move beyond naming streets and start building economies.
“When you shut down neighborhood schools, when you turn homeowners into renters, when you create a transient population without stability,” he said, “you break the spine of a community. You can’t just put his name on a sign. You have to do the work.”
Driving the Street With New Eyes
After my KNS story ran in 2022, I’ve driven MLK Avenue countless times again, but now I carry all the history with me.
I think about Mathes, teaching at Austin High and Austin-East, shaping students while pushing for recognition that the city wasn’t yet ready to grant. About Middlebrook and others, stepping into a moment when persistence finally aligned with political possibility. And about Alderman’s work, showing how these stories repeat themselves across geography.
Along the avenue, residents and entrepreneurs speak not in abstractions, but in their lived reality.
Tanika Harper, whose nonprofit and community space, Shora Foundation, sits near the corner of Chestnut and MLK, recently reflected on what the street means to her family. Her father’s business, B&B Lawncare, operated in the same building for decades.
“What makes me proud to be here are the people,” she said. “Having a business on MLK means I’m not just operating in a space, I’m accountable to it. But a street name alone doesn’t honor his legacy. Investment does.”
A Place That Holds Us
When I slow down and really look, I see a different East Knoxville than the one so often reduced to the ‘gun zone’.
I see Five Points, messy, layered, imperfect, but still standing. I pass WJBE radio, still broadcasting. Keenan Grimes’s Outreach Center meeting daily needs without fanfare. Jarnigan & Son Mortuary, a Black-owned institution that has held this community through generations of grief and remembrance.
Further along, Austin-East High School rises with quiet pride behind the Black Lives Matter mural painted across the pavement. It’s a place filled with history, producing students who go on to do great things.
As MLK stretches toward the Burlington district, the landscape thins. Buildings lean on memory more than maintenance. You can see where Black labor once built something lasting, and where abandonment followed when the city decided to look elsewhere.
Still, life persists.
There’s Lema’s Famous Chitlins, holding fast to tradition. Connect Ministries is still serving. By the time MLK runs into Holston Drive, Tammy’s food truck sits like a promise on wheels, a woman who figured out how to make it work, the way Black folks in this city always have.
Yes, there is blight. There are buildings barely holding on. There are decades of disinvestment etched into brick and boarded windows. East Knoxville once thrived not because the city poured into it, but because Black people kept it going anyway. When highways cut through neighborhoods, when businesses were lost, when “revitalization” became a word that rarely included us, the community adjusted.
That part rarely makes it into planning documents.
The promise of the Magnolia Avenue corridor and Burlington streetscapes hangs in the air, shaped by cautious optimism and long memory. We’ve heard promises before. We’ve watched timelines stretch.
History has taught us that survival doesn’t come from waiting.
So when I drive down MLK, I don’t just see what’s broken.
I see what’s holding on.
I see what’s enduring.
I see a community that never stopped moving, even when the city looked the other way.
And that, to me, is the real beauty of this street … the part you only notice when you take the time to look.
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