You are Not Helping

How the naming of a road could be such a source of controversy in Port St. Joe remains elusive.

But such is the case of a connector road linking the business districts in south and north Port St. Joe.

The idea of the road is commendable.

Just as with the demolition of a mill or an Arizona Chemical plant, continuing to find ways to knock down the walls, or pave the railroad beds, that long divided the town seems a fine idea.

I can remember not all that many years ago when a bright young lady at Port St. Joe High School wrote a scholarship-earning essay pertaining to how her city – Port St. Joe – remained divided by railroad tracks.

The tracks are gone but the railroad bed is not and the effort by some citizens to see a road that connects Williams Avenue with Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. become a reality is a well-intentioned exercise that has come to include a handful of businesses and organizations willing to donate time, services or land.

This is a good community project.

But the naming of the road devolved into something a little less glossy.

As the mayor acknowledged, in trying to bring folks together commissioners created something of a wedge that served to divide.

The naming, city commissioners should have pointed out, was intended because few on either side of the railroad track bed would necessarily invite the name from the other side.

In other words, folks on the south side of the tracks likely would not embrace Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. and those on the north side would not likely be embracing of Williams Avenue as a name.

While several residents lobbied to have the road named for Dr. King, honoring Dr. David Langston seemed an appropriate action given what Dr. Langston achieved in his life.

No insult to Dr. King, who paved the way for a Dr. Langston to flourish, but the honor seems appropriate for Dr. Langston, a favored son who had done much to improve the lot of children in seven counties who hailed from all walks of life.

But a lesson to take away from the entire exercise, which mercifully ended two weeks ago when the city commission voted to name the road, when built, in honor of Dr. Langston, is one we have long championed in the accompanying space on this page.

For if the naming exercise showed anything, there is no such thing as a homogenous population.

And this undermines the entire concept of single-member districts.

The impetus for single-member districts back in the 1980s was to provide a minority voice and ensure minority representation in government.

In that time, in that era, maybe it was a necessity.

But now it seems an anachronism and nowhere was that born out more clearly than in the naming of that connector road.

While County Commissioner Nathan Peters, Jr., who brought the federal lawsuit that put the county under single-member districts and now represents what could be considered the minority neighborhood of Port St. Joe – though those lines become more blurred by the week – continually attests to be the voice of his district, he can no more possess that claim than any other commissioner.

While Mr. Peters was in front of the city fathers last week attesting that the overwhelming majority of people in his district favor naming the road after Dr. Langston, there were those who attested that Mr. Peters might have been talking out of his hat.

A petition had been offered to the city commission two weeks before that, it was attested, contained more than 200 signatures opposing the naming of the road after Dr. Langston.

At least two letters were received by the city supporting the naming of the road in honor of Dr. King and one speaker last week made a similar argument, that the road should be a continuation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.

This was not dissimilar to what happened after the initial proposal to expand the city’s redevelopment agency lines to include the neighborhood known as North Port St. Joe.

There were voices strongly in favor; others filed a federal civil rights lawsuit.

All this is to make the point that no group – Republican, Democrat, white, black, Christian, non-Christian – exists in lock-step with everybody else in the same sub-group.

We have become too used to generalizations and labels that snare disparate viewpoints under a common umbrella.

They simply don’t help the public discourse, now or at any other time.

Single-member districts are a symptom of that ill, an idea that somehow the county is better off with its people divided by five, divided under generalities of viewpoint and purpose.

Only the generalities don’t work, as the road-naming process in Port St. Joe the past month demonstrated.

And what is left is the division.