I was driving down Seventh Street two years ago with a friend of mine when we spotted a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. by a traffic light.
The Rev. Warren Stewart, a candidate to represent the downtown District 8 in the Phoenix City Council, ran ads on street corners with the faces of King and himself.
My friend remarked that he thought the ads were crass. He didn’t see any reasonable connection between an Arizona political figure and Martin Luther King Jr. and concluded that the ad was ahistorical and pandering. What he didn’t know about — reasonably enough as, like me, he is not an Arizona native — is the troubling history of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Arizona, a history as vitally relevant to remember on this day as ever.
MLK Day, officially “Martin Luther King Jr./Civil Rights Day” in Arizona, was not recognized for many years after it became a national holiday. Sen. John McCain voted against the MLK Day bill in 1983, though he came to support MLK Day in Arizona by the early 1990s.
Democratic Gov. Bruce Babbitt created the holiday in Arizona by executive order in 1986, the same year the holiday was first recognized nationally after approval by Ronald Reagan.
But the next year, Babbit’s Republican successor Evan Mecham revoked the order, concluding that the order was illegal. In 1990, two ballot proposals to instate MLK Day as a paid state holiday failed at the voting booths.
Mecham, incidentally, was a man who (among other things) used a racial slur to describe black children and defended himself from charges of racism by saying “I’ve got black friends. I employ black people. I don’t employ them because they are black; I employ them because they are the best people who applied for the cotton-picking job.”
After both proposals failed, Coretta Scott King organized a boycott of the state. The NFL made good on a promise to relocate the 1993 Super Bowl away from its planned host city of Tempe — a threat that was echoed last year in the uneasy days before Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed Senate Bill 1062, the bill that would have allowed businesses to fire or refuse service to anyone on religious grounds, and which became the focus of national news as encouraging discrimination toward the LGBT community.
Hip-hop group Public Enemy released the protest song “By the Time I Get to Arizona” in 1991, with scathing lyrics that declared “the whole state’s racist.” This is the consequence of Arizona’s petty and problematic civil rights politics, which paint the whole state on the national stage as backward.
As the Arizona Republic reported, Stewart, the City Council representative candidate, became “the face of the pro-King Day movement” in Arizona. Stewart’s massive political effort to organize, register new voters and promote a new ballot proposition saw the holiday finally approved by voters in 1992.
Learning all of this history, my friend was appalled. It didn’t seem possible to him that any state would so strongly fight MLK Day to such obvious detriment to its image and standing, considering the moral obliviousness of that opposition.
Arizona’s 23rd official MLK Day is a good time to reflect on the state’s continued challenges — and occasional progress — in civil-rights politics.
Just last month, protesters took to the streets in downtown Phoenix multiple times after Rumain Brisbon, a Phoenix resident and father, was shot and killed by police. Brisbon was unarmed, and the shooting was one of too many national incidents that raised awareness of police brutality and discriminatory policing practices.
Broadway Road in South Phoenix was recently ceremonially renamed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Although the street’s formal name remains Broadway Road, the ceremonial renaming amended the fact that Phoenix was one of the few major cities in the nation without a street named for King.
SB 1062‘s passage in the state legislature prompted public outcry, protests outside the Capitol and an organized campaign for businesses to show opposition to the bill with signs reading “Open for Business to Everyone” that were visible throughout the state. The bill was ultimately vetoed, but not before its very existence garnered significant national scorn.
It is worth noting that Arizona does not protect against discrimination in private employment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity at the state level anyway — however, some cities have jumped ahead in this regard, including Phoenix. Recently, ASU social work senior Monica Jones was charged and convicted in an antiprostitution bust that she maintains was wrongful, an incident that highlights discrimination toward and stereotyping of transgender women.
SB 1070, which did become law (albeit with blocked provisions), requires police to attempt to determine immigration status when there is “reasonable suspicion” that someone who has been stopped, detained or arrested might be undocumented. Critics accuse the law of enabling racial profiling, and it has elicited boycotts and protests in more than 70 cities.
The legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., a half-century after the Voting Rights Act was passed and a year after it was scaled back by the Supreme Court, is in the ongoing struggle for justice and equality for all Americans on any number of fronts.
I urge readers to take some time today to reflect on this state’s complicated past, its present struggles and the words of Martin Luther King Jr.:
“Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten. A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. If it loses the will to finish or slackens in its determination, history will recall its crimes and the country that would be great will lack the most indispensable element of greatness — justice.”
Contact the author at bkutzler@asu.edu
