Martin Luther King Day, riots, and H Street NE, Washington, DC

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rev. Abernathy on the First Desegregated Bus, Montgomery, Dec. 21, 1956
Originally uploaded by rllayman

(Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rev. Abernathy on the First Desegregated Bus, Montgomery, Dec. 21, 1956. Photo by Ernest Withers.)

USA Today has a nice feature on this, including a well-done video story on H Street NE, with excellent photos and interviews. See "40 years after the riots, King's vision 'unfinished'." (There are also videos on neighborhoods in Kansas City and Chicago.)

I have been meaning to write about the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton debacle over "it takes a president, not a village, to get things done."

The reality is that change is a process. As I have written before in terms of the writing by John Friedmann in terms of creating radical planning discourse, government is oriented to system maintenance and a wee bit of change and innovation. Transformation efforts, and the Civil Rights Movement was the biggest social and political transformation effort/movement in U.S. society in the past 60+ years, start from outside government, with the people. (Revolutionary movements challenge governments and the entire political system.) Sure, laws are only changed by elected officials, but it takes thousands, millions of individual efforts before the point of legislative and/or executive branch change within government is reached, and eventually (if ever) realized.