Sixth Avenue Heartache

Abstract

This article examines the controversy surrounding the renaming of a street for Martin Luther King Jr. in the city of Zephyrhills, Florida in 2003–2004. By paying close attention to the language deployed during a series of contentious city council meetings, the author traces how Zephyrhills’s divisive history and neoliberal spatial order kept white residents from grappling with the city’s legacy of racism, inequality, residential segregation, and memory of the Civil Rights movement. Ultimately, it reveals Americans’ limited capacity to recognize and discuss race in the post–Civil Rights era.