Martin Luther King Jr streets on economic outskirts
Even as the memory of King remains at the heart of American discourse, many of his namesake streets are drifting further to the social and economic periphery...
After Martin Luther King Day, AOL.com is taking time to remember him and report on the streets that have been named after him. Real estate agents are also taking notice that many of the places named after King are in economic peril.
Twenty-six years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was first honored with a holiday, his legacy has flourished — and not just in the annals of history. Today, there are more than an estimated 900 streets in America that bear the civil rights leader’s name.
But even as the memory of King remains at the heart of American discourse, many of his namesake streets are drifting further to the social and economic periphery.
“There tends to be a marginalization of King’s name,” Derek Alderman, professor of geography at East Carolina University, told AOL Real Estate. Alderman, who has spent the better part of a decade chronicling the number of streets named after the slain civil rights leader, has encountered the paradox many times before — beloved as the man may be, in real estate, some homebuyers and store owners ascribe a kind of stigma to the name.
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