The old lady deserved her seat in the back of that convertible, just as Dr King deserved to join Christopher Columbus and others who played pivotal roles in US history, by having his own day in the calendar.All of which brings me to the conviction that Britain should borrow the idea, and give great achievers their own days. Our much-criticised honours system could then be phased out, to be replaced by a far more democratic arrangement.There would be no more knights of the realm, but a Michael Caine Day and a Clive Woodward Day. Her subsequent arrest, for violating the city’s Jim Crow statutes, provoked a black boycott of the buses and a campaign of non-violent protest led by Dr King which eventually led to desegregation of public transport. There’s a statue of a peach tree outside.”Martin Luther King, who would have been 75 this month, will never be as big a source of pride to Atlanta as the peach tree Not while there are still so many folk with prarblms. But his memory was celebrated in fine style that winter’s day, 18 years ago, with marching bands, majorettes, and a procession of dignitaries waving from the backs of huge convertibles, among them an old black lady who looked decidedly embarrassed by all the fuss.She was Rosa Parks, the former seamstress from Montgomery, Alabama, who on 1 December 1955, had refused to give up her bus seat to a white man.
“Ah don’t have a prarblm but ah know folks who do,” was the refrain of white-collar racists everywhere. And lest ah start sounding sanctimonious, it’s worth noting the results of Mori survey published this week, which finds that in Britain, four out of 10 white people do not want a black neighbour. The prarblm is not only an American one.Anyway, in January 1986 I joined an extraordinary cavalcade to mark the inaugural Martin Luther King Day. Several hundred thousand people marched through downtown Atlanta, along thoroughfares mostly named after the peach tree. A great deal of Atlanta is named Peachtree this or that, incidentally.To ask for directions in Atlanta is to find yourself in a kind of Monty Python sketch “You want the Peachtree Center? Sho’, honey.
Go down Peachtree Street and make a left into Peachtree Road, then make a right down Peachtree Avenue, cross Peachtree Plaza, and you’ll see it between the Peachtree Hilton and the Peachtree Hyatt Regency You can’t miss it, honey. “Ah don’t have a prarblm,” they used to say.In the Deep South, “a prarblm” was a commonly-used euphemism. It was established by the Reagan administration in 1986, when by chance I was living in Atlanta, Georgia, the murdered civil rights leader’s home town. Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day in the United States, a public holiday solemnly observed by some, deeply resented by others, and pretty much ignored by most. Even in Atlanta there were plenty of good ol’ boys who thought it an insult to the Stars and Stripes, or at any rate the Confederate flag, and they were mostly the kind of folk who strenuously denied being racist. Keep those queries rolling in – and those faux pas by the famous!
More from Miles Kington. Let my readers be my monitors, and send me gaffes by the great and good, and let us see if we have enough for a surprise best-seller come next Christmas!Dr Wordsmith will be back again soon.
