Nearly 70 percent of voters in a Kansas City, Mo. municipal election on Tuesday approved removing Dr. Martin Luther King’s name from one of the city’s most historic boulevards, less than a year after the city council decided to rename The Paseo for the civil rights icon.
Unofficial results showed the proposal to remove King’s name received nearly 70 percent of the vote, with just over 30 percent voting to retain King’s name.
Many supporters of the Martin Luther King name suggested the opponents are racist, according to NBC News, saying Save the Paseo is a mostly white group and that many of its members don’t live on the street, which runs north to south through a largely black area of the city.
The Paseo, named after Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma, provided a stable place for African-American families to live when their options were limited by legalized segregation through the mid-1900s.
Kansas City is one of the rare large cities in the United States without a street honoring King.
