Crenshaw by Any Other Name

Torre Brannon Reese has more juice in a campaign to rename Crenshaw Malcolm X Boulevard, a pet cause since 1995. Reese runs a nonprofit called FAMLI (For Afrikan Mental Liberation International), which sponsors Leimert Park’s annual Malcolm X festival and most recently formed a collective called Artists for Justice and Liberation to save a row of financially endangered storefronts along Degnan Boulevard in Leimert. Like a lot of people, Reese was indignant when he heard about Holden’s attempt to fast-track the Bradley name change through City Hall, chiefly because it was being done without any community input. For people like Reese, who spend a lot of time circulating petitions and putting up fliers on telephone posts, this is a real affront. Possibly there’s a bit of sour grapes in agitating for Malcolm for years, only to get bigfooted in two weeks by Bradley — establishment wins again — but Reese insists his beef is about consensus. “We didn’t even get a call from Nate,” he says. “It’s not respectful of those who’ve had a public movement going for years.”

Not that Reese ever expected politicians to embrace the idea of upwardly mobile Crenshaw bearing the still-controversial legacy of Malcolm X, but it’s useful to remember that former 8th District Councilman Bob Farrell was very much in the middle of the effort to rename Santa Barbara Avenue Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard back in the ’80s. Farrell supports the Bradley renaming, which is both predictable and surprising — Farrell was always an establishment figure, but he also fought against political tides for the King renaming, a campaign that, unlike Bradley’s, was conducted from the grassroots up.

For now, the stretch of Crenshaw that runs from Wilshire to the Inglewood border will retain its name: Last Friday, the council unanimously agreed to send the proposal back to committee and solicit community input. Neighborhood groups were satisfied, not least because at the heart of the matter are two very big issues for black people — cultural sovereignty and power of identity. Questions of who gets to name us and why rattle us right down to the bones and reverberate through the ages, from slavery on through to the rap billboards routinely posted along Crenshaw that offer the recording industry’s latest takes on “real” black images, lest we forget what they are. I have actually lived more in fear of de-naming — waking up one morning to find that the southernmost part of Crenshaw, the part that winds up through Palos Verdes and gently disappears, has been changed to something entirely generic, like Sea Breeze Avenue — something to finally shake off the shackles of Crenshaw, a street that’s popularly black whether you paint it as bourgeoisie or Boyz N the Hood, and therefore unfit for upscale or even middle-scale South Bay consumption. That would still leave Crenshaw to us, but there would be less of it overall, less of what makes it as grand and diverse a thoroughfare as Wilshire or Figueroa or Sepulveda. We may fight over a street considered ours, but even if Malcolm triumphs in the end, victory really depends on Crenshaw belonging to everyone.