Super Tuesday voters could put brakes on Trump -- but will they? -- Feb. 25, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

When Southern Democrats dreamed up Super Tuesday in the 1980s, they hoped to reinvigorate the party in the South by giving it clout in choosing the party’s presidential nominee.

Or as then-Tennessee Democratic Chairman Dick Lodge memorably put it in 1986: “When your dog bites you four or five times, it’s time to get a new dog. We’ve been bitten and it’s time for the South to get a new dog.”

Two years earlier, conservative Southerners, long fed up with Democrats’ presidential picks, not only rejected Walter Mondale and helped re-elect Ronald Reagan but also voted for Republicans for Congress.

Even the new dog couldn’t bring those voters back. They’ve been voting Republican ever since.

Today officials in both parties worry about the down-ballot consequences if insurgents Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders actually become their parties’ nominees.

Both parties are pinning their hopes on Super Tuesday, March 1, when more delegates will be chosen than on any other day during the primary season. Voters in a dozen states -- including Alabama, Tennessee and Virginia -- will cast ballots.

Big question: Will Super Tuesday help choose a widely acceptable nominee – or prolong the agony for the party establishment?

In 2008, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama kept fighting after Super Tuesday’s 22 contests were inconclusive.

Today though, Clinton holds a commanding lead over Sanders in polls in Virginia and other Super Tuesday Southern states, where black voters dominate.

Among Republicans, Ted Cruz, who won the Iowa GOP caucuses, says Super Tuesday will be “the most important night of this campaign.” Rivals Marco Rubio and John Kasich also hope to break out and put the brakes on Trump.

Trump Fever, however, seems to be spreading. The billionaire businessman’s margin of victory widened from New Hampshire to South Carolina to Nevada. In Nevada, Trump won 46 percent of the vote, about the same as Rubio and Cruz combined.  Kasich and Ben Carson together didn’t reach 10 percent.

Super Tuesday was also more snooze than shock in 2012. President Barack Obama was running unopposed for re-election in most states, so all the action was on the Republican side.

Mitt Romney hoped to sweep Super Tuesday states and force his rivals from the GOP race. Romney captured 40 percent of the popular vote and about half the delegates – a performance seen as underwhelming and predictable, much like the candidate himself.

Georgia went for Newt Gingrich and Alabama and Tennessee supported Rick Santorum, who also won North Dakota and Oklahoma and came within a whisker of beating Romney in Ohio. Neither Gingrich nor Santorum was able to qualify for the ballot in Virginia, where Romney won.

“With No Knockout Punch, a Bruising Battle Plods On,” read a headline in The New York Times the day after Super Tuesday.

This time around, Trump -- endorsed by Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University and son of the late televangelist – has surprised the establishment by winning support from white evangelical voters, who dominate the Southern GOP.

In Alabama and Tennessee, for example, more than 70 percent of GOP primary voters are white evangelical Christians, an analysis by Geoffrey Skelley of the University of Virginia Center for Politics found.

In Tennessee, record numbers of Republican voters have turned out for early primary voting, which could bode well for Trump, although that’s uncertain as there have been no recent polls. Cruz and Rubio are also courting evangelicals.

In Virginia, while about 40 percent of the Republican primary vote is evangelical, 58 percent of voters are college educated, says UVa’s Skelley who suggests Northern Virginia voters could blunt Trump, and Rubio could benefit. Trump led in a Christopher Newport University poll of likely Republican primary voters in Virginia in mid-February.

The richest delegate states on Super Tuesday are Texas and Georgia, where Trump is strong. He and Cruz were neck and neck in the latest polls, released Thursday, while earlier Cruz had led handily in his home state. Trump leads by double digits in Georgia and Alabama, according to the polls.

Trump appears to have momentum, and the South is poised to solidify him as the GOP frontrunner. How ironic if Super Tuesday, which was intended to give Southern conservatives a moderating influence on presidential choices, made Trump unstoppable.

If that happens, the parties may want to get a new dog.  

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

For the court: `someone smart' -- Feb. 18, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Nearly everybody has advice for President Barack Obama about the Supreme Court vacancy caused by the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia, even Scalia himself.

Scalia, although a Harvard Law grad, was a fierce critic of the Harvard-Yale axis on the court and the narrow range of background and experience of the justices whose opinions shape American life.

This court “consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School.” Four are natives of New York City, eight grew up in east- and west-coast states, he wrote last June in a dissent in the same-sex marriage case.

“Only one hails from the vast expanse in between. Not a single Southwesterner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count). Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans), or even a Protestant of any denomination,” said Scalia.

All the justices are either Jewish or Roman Catholic. Justice Clarence Thomas, a former Baptist who’s now a Catholic, joined Scalia, also Catholic, in the dissent.

Scalia’s astringent dissents – he was often in the minority – won him many fans in law schools, where he loved to lecture, debate and counsel students. Known for his wit and intellect, he was a popular professor at the University of Virginia from 1967 to 1974. 

He had hired six U. Va. law grads as his clerks in the last 10 years, helping build a path for a new generation to the highest court. A Supreme Court clerkship is often a stepping stone to becoming a federal judge and even a Supreme Court justice.

Obama says he will nominate someone with “an outstanding legal mind” to replace Scalia. The president likely will remember Scalia’s advice after Justice David Souter announced his retirement in 2009. 

   

“I hope he sends us someone smart,” Scalia told David Axelrod, then Obama’s senior adviser, at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Surprised by Scalia’s overture, Axelrod replied that he was sure the president would do so, he recalled this week in a commentary he wrote for cnn.com. But Scalia persisted.

“`Let me put a finer point on it,’ the justice said, in a lower, purposeful tone of voice, his eyes fixed on mine. `I hope he sends us Elena Kagan,’” Axelrod wrote.

Axelrod was shocked that the court’s leading conservative would propose a liberal for the court. But Kagan and Scalia shared “intellectual rigor and a robust sense of humor,” Axelrod explained, “And if Scalia could not have a philosophical ally in the next court appointee, he had hoped, at least, for one with the heft to give him a good honest fight.”

That time, Obama chose Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic justice. The next year, though, when Justice John Paul Stevens retired, the president did choose Kagan.

To expand the court’s horizons this time, Obama may nominate someone whose name is unfamiliar to many Americans: Sri Srinivasan (SREE SREE-nee-vah-sun), a federal appeals court judge.

Srinivasan, 48, is known for his outstanding legal mind, his collegiality and his open-mindedness. He was born in India, emigrated to the United States as a young child and grew up in Kansas.

A graduate of Stanford University with three degrees, he clerked for 4^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III in Richmond, Va., and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee, has called him “lightning smart.”

The Senate unanimously confirmed Srinivasan to the D.C. Circuit in 2013. He won  kudos from Republicans and Democrats, although he drew liberal opposition for representing Exxon Mobil and Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling.

As a law clerk in Richmond, Srinivasan and fellow law clerk Ted Cruz, became friends. Senator Cruz praised and voted to confirm Srinivasan in 2013 but said Wednesday that if Obama nominates him for the nation’s highest court, he will not vote for him.

Cruz wants the election to be a referendum on the court. That’s politics.

Srinivasan would be the first justice from South Asia, the first Hindu on the Supreme Court and the first justice born outside the United States since Felix Frankfurter served from 1939 to 1962.

Yes, Mister President, send “someone smart.”

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Celebrate Washington's birthday -- or not? -- Column of Feb. 11, 2016

By MARSHA MERCER

Poor George.

Most Americans will stay home from work Monday to observe a federal holiday that’s still officially called Washington’s Birthday, though you’d hardly know it.

On Presidents Day, Washington is largely ignored – except when he’s being knocked.

Yes, some states, including Virginia, and some cities and counties still call the third Monday in February Washington Birthday, and there are a few parades, speeches and cake. 

But the holiday is popularly referred to as Presidents Day, even though Congress and the president never changed the name.

Beloved in life, Washington was lionized following his death in 1799. Eulogized as “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” he became a hero clothed in myth.

An early biographer invented the cherry tree story – “I cannot tell a lie” – to demonstrate young George’s high moral character. “McGuffey’s Readers” picked the story up – as did P.T. Barnum, says the Digital Encyclopedia of George Washington, which is maintained by Mount Vernon.

Librarians at Mount Vernon have tracked down other false tales. They’ve also posted on mountvernon.org several Spurious Quotations wrongly attributed to Washington.

It’s good to set the record straight, but one aspect of Washington’s life challenges a favorable view of him. What are we in the 21^st century to make of the Father of our Country having been an active slave owner for 56 years?

It’s hard for us to imagine virtuous George becoming a slave-owner at the tender age of 11 after his father died and willed him a 250-acre farm and 10 slaves. Hard to picture George as a young man adding to his slave holdings or vastly increasing his slave population when he married.

Yet there were 318 slaves living at Mount Vernon at the time of his death.

Slavery is the indelible stain on early America. Slaves quarried and cut the stones for the U.S. Capitol and helped build the White House. Eight presidents owned slaves while serving in office, and four others owned slaves at some point in their lives.

Washington was troubled by slavery but failed to act while he was alive. Only in his will did he leave a provision to free his slaves following the death of Martha Washington. The remaining slaves were hers through her first husband, who had died.

But Washington did more than Thomas Jefferson, who never freed his slaves.

 

We still struggle with how to portray the era, as the controversy last month over a picture book for children demonstrated.

Scholastic Press published and then stopped selling “A Birthday Cake for George Washington,” after critics charged it presented too gentle a view of slave life under Washington.

Scholastic denied it was bowing to pressure but said, “We believe that without more historical background on the evils of slavery than this book for younger children can provide, the book may give a false impression of the reality of the lives of enslaved people and therefore should be withdrawn.”

Pulling a book may put out a public relations fire – although free speech advocates rightly criticized the publisher for self-censorship. But hiding our past won’t help us learn from it.

 

Author Stephen E. Ambrose, writing shortly before his death in 2002, considered how much Washington’s and Jefferson’s ownership of slaves diminished their greatness.

The founders failed to rise above their time and place but they established a system of government that eventually led -- through turmoil, the Civil War and the civil rights movement -- to “legal freedom for all Americans and a movement toward equality,” Ambrose wrote in Smithsonian magazine.

“Washington personifies the word `great.’ In his looks, in his regular habits, in his dress and bearing, in his generalship and his political leadership, in his ability to persuade, in his sure grip on what the new nation needed (above all else, not a king), and in his optimism no matter how bad the American cause looked, he rose above all others,” he wrote.

We in the 21^st century owe a debt to Washington, flawed and human as he was, for his vision of a country where all men are created equal. That genius of an idea started us on the path we are on toward equality for all.

Yes, we should celebrate Washington’s birthday.

© 2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Military draft -- not for men only -- Feb. 4, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

The last draftees opened the momentous letters in 1972: “You are hereby ordered for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States.”

Since then, generations of young men have registered with the Selective Service System, starting when they turn 18 through age 25. It’s the law. Young women can’t register for the draft even if they want to.

A consensus is growing that it’s time, finally, for women to register. Equality demands it.  

With all jobs in the military – including combat -- now open to women, it’s unfair to conscript only men in a national emergency.  

The Obama administration has not yet decided about changing policy, but two top generals said they personally believe women should register.

“Senator, I think that all eligible and qualified men and women should register for the draft,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chief of staff of the Army, said Tuesday at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Gen. Robert B. Neller , the Marine Corps commandant, agreed. 

“I do too,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who had asked the generals’ opinion. She suggested that if women were required to register, more might see the military as a career option.

The all-volunteer force relies on a relatively small group. Only one in four young Americans 18 to 24 can qualify for the military; three in four fail to meet education or physical standards or have disqualifying criminal records.

“To shrink that pool deprives us of a lot of talent,” Neller said.

Whether the Pentagon’s decision to open 220,000 jobs to women could hurt the military is a concern in some quarters. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., fears standards will be lowered if women fail rigorous training programs. For example, 29 female Marine officers have attempted, but not passed, the infantry officer course.

“I don’t see how we can guarantee that in the future, these standards will not be diminished,” Wicker said.

While most people hope the draft will never again be needed, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., a Korean war combat veteran in the Army, favors reinstating it. Others on Capitol Hill favor abolishing the Selective Service and registration altogether. Congress has been cool to both.

President Bill Clinton, who worked to avoid the draft as a young man, in 1995 called the Selective Service a “relatively low-cost insurance policy.” The idea is to deter threats and show that the United States has the means and will to defend itself.

Whether women should be conscripted, though, has long been debated. Near the end of World War II, when nearly 400,000 women enlisted in the military, a nurse shortage prompted President Franklin Roosevelt to call for a bill to draft nurses. The House approved but the Senate balked. The war ended, making the subject moot.

After Vietnam, peacetime draft registration stopped. On Feb. 8, 1980, President Jimmy Carter, reacting to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, announced that he was sending Congress a plan to register men -- and women -- for the draft, should one become necessary.

“There is no distinction possible, on the basis of ability or performance, that would allow me to exclude women from an obligation to register,” Carter said. He stressed that women were not in units likely to experience close combat – and he had no intention of changing that policy.

Congress restarted registration – for men only.

A case challenging the exclusion of women went to the Supreme Court.  In Rostker v. Goldberg, the court upheld the policy, saying it did not violate the Due Process Clause. With women restricted from combat, men and women were not “similarly situated” with regard to registration, the court ruled.

Other cases challenging men-only registration are currently making their way through the courts. 

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter expects Congress to decide whether women should register for the draft.

“It goes back to the need to think generations ahead,” he said Wednesday. The best military in the future will need to “reach into the largest pool of people.”

Resistance to registering women for the draft likely will come from both the left and the right.

“Of course, the idea of parity probably sounds great until you’re putting your daughter on a bus to boot camp,” Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, wrote on the group’s site.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama tried to have it both ways. He favored registering women for military service, he said, although,  “I don’t agree with the draft.”

But it never hurts to be prepared and to share the burden of service.

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Presidential hopefuls about to head south -- Jan. 28, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

In Iowa and New Hampshire, presidential hopefuls are battling for votes in small states that are only slightly more diverse than this year’s Oscar nominations.

Just 3 percent of Iowans and 1 percent of New Hampshire residents are black.

After the Iowa caucuses Monday night and the New Hampshire primary Feb. 9, though, the candidates and the news media will converge on states that look more like America – with larger proportions of black and Hispanic voters – and will talk about issues that affect more people.

Yes, the 2016 election really is about more than ethanol.

February also is Black History Month, a time to celebrate the achievements of African Americans, review racial progress and set goals. Significant in any election year, discussions about political influence will be especially relevant seven years after the first black president took office.

African Americans voted at higher rates than whites in the 2012 general election, according to the Census Bureau, and their votes re-elected President Barack Obama, an analysis by the Cook Political Report found.

The crucial question for the fall is whether Democrats, without Obama on the ballot, can again inspire African Americans to go to the polls.

South Carolina’s Democratic primary Feb. 27 will be the first test of Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’ strength among black voters in the South. Fifty-five percent of the Democratic primary voters there are black.

Clinton, favored heavily in the polls, wants to avoid a repeat of her 2008 debacle, when she first led Obama in polls in South Carolina only to lose badly on primary day.

Analysts suggest that Sanders, with his flinty Vermont demeanor and Democratic socialist tag, can’t connect with Southerners. But he just won the support of South Carolina state Rep. Justin T. Bamberg, who had backed Clinton.

Bamberg is black and the lawyer for the family of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man who was fatally shot by a North Charleston police officer. Bamberg said he switched his support to Sanders after talking with him for 20 minutes on the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday.

Few policy differences separate Clinton and Sanders. For example, both favor raising the minimum wage, making college education free and expanding Medicaid.

But Clinton also proposes a $25 billion fund to specifically help historically black colleges and universities.  

Among Republicans in South Carolina, who will caucus Feb. 20, Donald Trump leads by Ted Cruz by double digits. Born-again or evangelical voters are about 55 percent of the primary vote there. Trump won an endorsement from Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University and son of the late televangelist.  

Nevada’s caucuses --Democrats on Feb. 20 and Republicans Feb. 23 – will be the first to hear from Western and Hispanic voters. 

Then comes Super Tuesday, March 1, when a dozen states -- including Alabama, Tennessee and Virginia -- hold presidential contests.

In some ways, the primaries and caucuses, important as they are in picking presidential nominees, are the warm-up for the big fight in November.  

“It’s tough to overstate just how critical black votes have become to today’s Democratic coalition, particularly when it comes to the Electoral College,” Amy Walter and David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report concluded after their analysis of 2012 exit poll data.

Blacks accounted for Obama’s entire margin of victory in Virginia and six other states in the last election, they said, adding, “Without these states’ 112 electoral votes, Obama would have lost decisively.”

Race has surfaced only a few times in the presidential campaigns so far. Candidates responded to the murders of nine black church members by a white gunman in Charleston, S.C., and the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds.

Several candidates stumbled early on when, commenting on the Black Lives Matter movement, they said, “all lives matter.” Critics saw “all lives matter” as diminishing the loss of black lives to police violence.

Trump, who draws predominately white crowds, insists he can win black votes. His frequent Muslim-bashing, though, works against him. Twenty-five percent of American Muslims are black. After he met in November with African-American ministers who reportedly advised him to stop referring to “the blacks,” he seems to have listened.

As their campaigns head south, all the candidates will need to be sensitive to racial issues and language. They won’t be in Iowa and New Hampshire anymore.  

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Why `Made in America' isn't clockwork -- Jan. 21, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

A lot is being made of being made in America.  

Republican presidential contender Donald J. Trump plays Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” at his rallies, needling rival Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada to an American mother and Cuban father.

Not to be outdone, Cruz, at the last GOP candidates’ debate, countered that some extreme birthers claim that for a person to be a natural-born citizen, both parents must also be native born. Trump’s mother was born in Scotland, so he would be disqualified.

“But I was born here,” Trump protested.

That’s politics, but anyone who’s tried to buy products made in America knows the frustration of the hunt.

Trump feels our pain.

“We want to buy USA, right?” the billionaire  businessman said Monday at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. Trump vowed that, as president, he’ll bring big-name manufacturing back to the United States.

“We’re gonna get Apple to start building their damn computers in this country, instead of in other countries,” he said.

Really? Trump doesn’t say how he will bring Apple back or whether he’s concerned that the cost of the iPhone and other gadgets could skyrocket if made here.  

Five years ago, Barack Obama asked Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs why Apple couldn’t build the iPhone here, to which Jobs replied, according to a New York Times report, “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”

Current Apple CEO Tim Cook, asked by NBC Nightly News in 2011 why Apple couldn’t be a Made in America company, said that while many Apple components are made here, America has lost the skills associated with manufacturing.

We forget that in the early 2000s almost all Apple products were American-made. In today’s increasingly global economy, they’re designed in the USA but most are made in China.

Being Made in USA is not a random act of patriotism; it’s a hard-nosed business decision. Companies know we want to buy American, and they encourage our goodwill by plastering their ads with American flags, maps and slogans.

The question arises: How much of a product must actually be American-made to carry the Made in America label?

The Federal Trade Commission, which protects the Made in America name, says that if a company claims a product is Made in USA, “all or virtually all” its parts or components need to be made here.

“The product should contain no – or negligible – foreign content,” the FTC says.

But what’s virtually all and what’s negligible? The FTC hasn’t set specific percentages.

Final assembly or processing must take place in the United States, then other factors come into play, including total manufacturing costs and how significant foreign content is to the final product, FTC says.

It’s not, in other words, clockwork.

In Detroit Wednesday, Obama, wearing his own Shinola watch, toured the Shinola plant, which touts its luxury watches as “Built in Detroit.” The company says its watches and bicycles are “100 percent assembled” in Detroit but, the Detroit Free Press reported, about one-third of its watch movements come from Thailand.

“Shinola’s goal is to build products that are predominantly American manufactured,” Shinola says on its website, which details country sources of various parts.  

The FTC has put watchmakers, among other manufacturers, on notice about Made in America claims. After an inquiry from the FTC, Niall Luxury in Kansas City agreed in November to revise marketing materials to reflect the use of Swiss movements.

If the standards aren’t confusing enough for manufacturers and consumers, California sets its own Made in America standard, previously requiring 100 percent domestic content.

Under a loosened state law, as of Jan. 1, Made in USA in California means foreign components are no more than 5 percent of final wholesale value or 10 percent if the manufacturer can show the components cannot be obtained or produced domestically.

Some in Congress are moving to lessen confusion. The Senate Commerce Committee passed a bill in November that makes the federal government – through the FTC -- solely responsible for developing and enforcing standards.

The measure will allow products to carry the Made in USA label “even if a small piece, such as a screw or shoe lace, is sourced from a foreign country,” said Sen. Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, a sponsor of the bill.

The idea is to encourage companies to stay here. We all want to see more jobs made in America.

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

At 30, MLK Jr. Holiday inspires action -- Jan. 14, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

On the first observance of the birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a federal holiday 30 years ago, President Ronald Reagan said it was a time for rejoicing and reflecting.

“We rejoice because, in his short life, Dr. King, by his preaching, his example, and his leadership, helped to move us closer to the ideals on which America was founded. We reflect on his words and his works,” Reagan said.

We still rejoice and reflect on the life of the Baptist minister and civil rights icon who was assassinated April 4, 1968, at the age of 39. He would have turned 87 on Jan. 15. But our troubled times demand more.

People gather for prayer breakfasts and worship services, read King’s writings and tell his stories to younger generations, and listen to choirs and panel discussions of King’s legacy. Some will emulate King’s struggle by marching in Black Lives Matter protests.

The holiday also inspires volunteering. President Bill Clinton signed the King Holiday and Service Act, establishing the holiday as a national day of service, in 1994.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans, starting with President Barack Obama and his family, join in the day of service, “picking up the baton handed to us by past generations and carrying forward their efforts,” Obama said last year.

In his final State of the Union address, Obama said he is inspired by the “voices that help us see ourselves not, first and foremost, as black or white . . . but as Americans first, bound by a common creed. Voices Dr. King believed would have the final word – voices of unarmed truth and unconditional love.”

We hear precious little about unconditional love in politics, but King said in his 1964 speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize: “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”

Obama said the voices of truth and love “don’t get a lot of attention; they don’t seek a lot of fanfare; but they’re busy doing the work this country needs doing.”

After 30 years, most people may not remember that Congress dithered for 15 years before enacting the holiday. Congress finally passed the bill and Reagan signed it in 1983, effective in 1986. Some states dragged their feet even longer on adopting a state holiday for King. The last was New Hampshire in 1999.

Even today, the holiday remains contentious in a few states.

Three states – Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi – celebrate the birthdays of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and King on the same day. The joint holiday once may have seemed a pragmatic compromise but now is cringe-worthy, especially as Southern states have reconsidered or removed vestiges of their Confederate past.

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, told reporters Jan. 6 that he hoped the legislature will separate the King and Lee birthdays. An effort to do so last year failed.

Virginia separated King from Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson in 2000 and now has a state holiday honoring the Confederates on the Friday before the King holiday on the third Monday in January. Richmond, Lynchburg, Bristol and several other cities in Virginia no longer observe the Lee-Jackson holiday.

Alabama still has three state holidays honoring Confederate heroes. Besides the King-Lee holiday, Confederate Memorial Day is April 25 and Jefferson Davis’ Birthday is June 6. Alabama is the only state with a holiday honoring the president of the Confederacy.

And the King holiday can be fraught with peril for politicians. Then-Sen. Hillary Clinton got in hot water in 2006 when she said at an MLK holiday event in Harlem that the GOP-led House of Representatives has been run “like a plantation – and you know what I’m talking about.”

Republicans insisted they were not racist. A Democratic senator from Illinois named Barack Obama defended Clinton.

As people drive to their volunteer service on King’s birthday, some will travel on a street named for him. About 900 boulevards, avenues, streets and courts in the United States are named for the civil rights leader, most in the Southeast.

Naming those streets often has been political, says Derek Alderman, geography professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, who has studied the issue since the 1990s.

Ironically, many streets named for the champion of justice and equality -- political and financial -- are in blighted and segregated communities. They serve as a graphic reminder of the civil rights struggles that remain three decades after the first national holiday for King’s birthday.

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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