By Phillip Bailey

There will be a sharp contrast in Louisville during this year’s celebration of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. As usual local politicians, multicultural organizations and civil rights activists have prepared a variety of polished and pristine events to further drain King’s legacy.

Always forgotten is the radical who attempted to build a progressive coalition that would brashly confront what Dr. King called the three principle evils in America, “the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation and the problem of war.”

At the top of that sugar coated list is the celebration concert hosted by Mayor Jerry E. Abramson and the Louisville Orchestra, who’ve invited special guest Laquita Mitchell to sing familiar spirituals while they pass out awards.

Beneath that thin candy shell and other similar events is the stench from the recent controversy over renaming Louisville’s 22nd Street to MLK Boulevard.

During the winter holidays Metro Council member Barbara Shanklin sponsored a plan to rename the otherwise mundane thoroughfare after the slain civil rights icon. This seemed historically fitting because Dr. King’s younger brother A.D. King preached at Zion Baptist Church, located at 22nd Street and Muhammad Ali Boulevard.

However, 22nd Street’s north side, which is the mostly working-class white neighborhood known as Portland, angrily rebuffed the proposal last month at a meeting held at Nelligan Hall. “[Dr. King] is not part of our community,” said Portland resident Jason Semar. Like many before, during and after that meeting, Semar kept highlighting Portland’s German-Irish heritage as the main reason for rejecting the name change.

Not that I’m against healthy racial-ethnic pride, but with that strict ethnic litmus test, I wondered standing amongst the crowd, what about the name “22nd Street” was so German-Irish? The cryptic message of racial animus became clearer on WAVE 3 news a few days later when another Portland resident, Virgil Holland, said, “All these different streets are being named after the blacks —