Don't ML King Me, King County

King County Councilman Larry Gossett is re-submitting his proposal to the City Council this month to spend $600,000 on changing the county's logo from a crown to the likeness of Dr. Martin Luther King. In a recent email to our local neighborhood council (Jackson Place), Gossett indicated that this would "finally give respect and visibility to the fact that our County's namesake is Dr. King."

This made Seattlest think "huhn", scratch our chin, and ponder this business about our county's namesake. Ultimately, we couldn't imagine that the 75% white King County was named after the venerable Dr. MLK (though we liked the idea). And originally, it wasn't.

Here's where we actually thank the Seattle Weekly, not a common occurence round the Seattlest headquarters. Knute Berger revealed a number of intersting facts on the topic back in 2000: 1) Gossett has been working on pushing this proposal through since 2000. 2) Back then he was claiming it would require $2-3 million! 3) King County was originally named after William Rufus DeVane King, Franklin Pierce's vice president. Here's the scoop on the county's original King from Berger:

William King, it turns out, was a marginal political figure with some baggage. Six months after his election he died and thus was unable to aid Pierce in being one of our country's worst presidents—let alone make any kind of a mark on the Pacific Northwest. He was also a slaveholder, though so was George Washington. An interesting footnote: He was also almost certainly gay. In the 1850s, his political enemies called him "Aunt Nancy" or "Aunt Fancy," and he had an intimate, live-in relationship with future president James Buchanan (both were bachelors).

In what we imagine must have been a fit of liberal guilt, the county voted (under Ron Sims) in 1986 to re-assign King county's namesake to the personage of Dr. King. Now before you come after us for that "liberal guilt" comment, believe us that we're not suggesting that people don't remember, honor, and try as hard as we might to live King's legacy. But this name change is a sad piece of revisionist history that was likely aimed at making Seattle seem the progressive, race-friendly place the City Council wanted it to appear. But in reality, King County is less than 6% black, over 75% white; "friendly" is not a word frequently uttered by the 6%.

Seattlest lives in the Central District, and no-one there is buying the non-white people a Coke and teaching us all to live in harmony. The issues are much deeper than a logo, and the frustration is at times seething amongst our neighbors and community business owners. Is putting Dr. King's face on the logo for King County going to keep Nickel's urban density development rampage from driving all our neighbors out of the area they've been living in for the past 20 years because they won't be able to afford the property taxes and they get run out of business by condos built over big-box chain stores? Yeah, we don't think so either.

And lastly, before you try to skewer us for not wanting to help honor Dr. King's memory, let's take a cue from the Christians, and ask "What would Martin do?" Would Dr. King really want us to spend at least a half a million dollars to put his face on signs, uniforms, and stationary? Or would he prefer we use that money to help the black community in King County put more kids in better schools, or build better community centers, or about at least a dozen other really important things that need to be done? Stephen Sharanksy over at Soundpolitics.com has written a great post with reasons for why we should do the latter, and we think Dr. King would agree.

We're not worthy, King County. Please, let's do all the hard work first to actually make Seattle a non-racially-divided city, and then put up Dr. King's face everywhere in honor of what we've done.

Re-worked KLM logo turned into crowned MLK logo from artist Basit Khan.