MLK Every Day

A TALE OF TWO KINGS: We spent part of our Martin Luther King Jr. Day taking a stroll in the sun in a park at the foot of our hill. There, we came across some signs with the words "King County" on them, and it got us to talking about the origin of our county's name.

While MLK's face is the official logo for our county now ...

CJ was aware that not too long ago, King County was named after an entirely different King.

When we got home, Annabelle researched the topic and came up with the following brief report:

While King County’s name didn’t change in 2007, the county’s namesake did. King County, originally established as such in 1852, was named after Vice President William Rufus de Vane King, a slave owner and supporter of the Fugitive Slave Act. King County Councilman Bruce Laing decided in 1986 that the namesake should be changed to better reflect the diversity and acceptance of the county. A 20-year bi-partisan campaign was started to change the logo and namesake to famous civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Instead of wasting loads of money and disposing of current materials with the old logo (a golden crown) and instead using them up before fully integrating the new one in 2006.

Honestly, I don't think I'd ever heard of William King before today. Interesting story there. Turns out he was only V.P. for thirteen weeks before he died. And that he was actually sworn in while in Cuba. He was there trying to convalesce, but succumbed to tuberculosis. 

Annabelle's information, which she says she gleaned from a King County website, painted William King in an entirely negative light. His Wikipedia article is considerably less damning. It says King "was a Unionist and his contemporaries considered him to be a moderate on the issues of sectionalism, slavery and westward expansion, which contributed to the American Civil War. He helped draft the Compromise of 1850."

Earlier in his life, he was elected as a U.S. Representative from North Carolina and a Senator from Alabama. Curious that a county in Washington State would up named after him, given that geography, but I learned that King was Vice President when the Washington Territory was created in 1853.

I also learned today that William King and James Buchanan had a long-term, extremely close relationship, and that there is much speculation that it was romantic in nature. The two lived together for 13 years, in fact, and Buchanan referred to their relationship as a "communion",^[and the two attended all parties together.

When Washington's King County voted to change its namesake, the vote was close:  It was passed by King County councilors five votes to four. 

For MLK Day, I asked CJ to research some facts about MLK that aren't so widely known. This is what he came up with (and I do wish he had cited his resources).

Martin Luther King Jr. was originally named Michael King Jr. In 1934, Martin Luther King Sr. (then Michael King Sr.) visited Germany, and, while there, was inspired by Martin Luther, the leader of the Protestant Reformation. Following this, Michael King Sr. changed his, and his son's name, to Martin Luther King.

Dr. King's first speech at the Lincoln Memorial was "Give Us the Ballot" in 1957, during the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom on May 17 of that year. In the speech, Dr. King urged the federal government to give African-Americans voting rights.

During his lifetime, Dr. King had been arrested nearly 30 times. Said arrests were presumably targeted at him in a racist manner. For example, in 1956, Dr. King was arrested in Montgomery for driving at 30 MPH on a 25 MPH road.

Dr. King had entered college at the age of 15, having skipped grades 9 and 12. King began attending Morehouse College in 1944.

in October 1991, a panel at Boston University found that portions of Dr. King's doctoral assertion were plagiarized from a paper written in 1952 by Jack Boozer, then a student at Boston University.

NPR: We recently reprogrammed all of our radio station preset buttons in our daily driver. In the process, I added National Public Radio to the line up. 

Good decision.

I'd say we have now NPR on about 40 percent of the time in the car. We have learned lots about current events, history, culture ... you name it. The reporting seems thorough, and the topics important - and eclectic. You can listen to it on their website: https://www.revealnews.org/tag/mountain-jane-doe/

Today, we happened upon a one-hour program called "Reveal," which is a project of The Center for Investigative Reporting. "Fortunately" we got stuck in a big traffic jam, so it kept our attention during what would have otherwise been a super frustrating time. 

The story was about Mountain Jane Doe - an unsolved murder in Kentucky dating back to . A petite female body was found stabbed to death, abandoned on a mountain road in Kentucky. For 47 years, no ID was ever made on the body, and no killer was identified. 

I don't want to spoil the story for you in case you care to listen, but let's just say that some answers have finally come, but they raise more questions.