In Search of a City of Racial Fairness

In the next few days, likely as early as Tuesday, the National Football League’s high and mighty will play out another episode in the continuing rivalry between Southern California’s largest cities.

The largest is Los Angeles, bigger and stronger but not as appealing as its neighbor down the street.

That would be San Diego.

The issue is not water, or who uses it more responsibly or efficiently. The issue is not air quality, or who is addressing it more responsibly or efficiently. The issue is not even The Merger.

No, this is really big stuff.

At stake here is the right to be the host city to the 1993 Super Bowl, which may be the most coveted orphan in the history of civilization. After all, it comes with an estimated $200 million dowry.

This particular game . . . and that is all it is . . . had been granted to Phoenix, but the citizens of Arizona voted against a statewide holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, who assumed the role of judge and jury, condemned Arizonans for what he determined to be a thoughtless expression of bigotry.

No one has, at yet, determined how the NFL commissioner concluded it was his position to make such an assessment of a election in which regard for Dr. King was not really the critical issue. If there were such as thing as a “free” holiday, meaning one without substantial cost to taxpayers, it undoubtedly would have passed.

It would be tempting now to say that what happened in Arizona has become ancient history, but it hasn’t.

San Diego, to be sure, has the taint of having taken Market Street and named it after Dr. King and then having had voters choose to reinstate the original name. This was hardly an expression of racism, it was maintained, but rather a return to the traditional name of a traditional street. Besides, merchants didn’t want to change their letterheads.

In retrospect, I would think San Diegans, inadvertently perhaps, did Dr. King a favor by taking his name off Market Street. It will never be confused with the Champs d’Elysees or Park Avenue or, for that matter, even San Diego’s Broadway.

Dr. King’s memory deserved better than Market Street, but that wasn’t the point. The public, after all, voted his name off the street signs. That was as controversial here as the vote was in Arizona.

To make sure the NFL is aware that San Diego, the charming kid down the freeway from LA, has its warts, the African-American Organizing Project will be represented at the meetings in Hawaii. It will do what it can to make the NFL aware San Diego’s voters have, in their way, done what Arizona’s voters did. What’s more, it will likely also be noted that the Port Commission rejected an idea to name the Convention Center in Dr. King’s memory.

Issues such as this might well turn Mr. Tagliabue’s head.

However, those representing the interests of a Super Bowl in San Diego have a rather hot issue at their disposal as well.

This issue is courtesy of the Los Angeles Police Department. The videotaped beating of one Rodney G. King has played to appalled viewers nationwide. This brutal incident was as racist as anything from the darkest hours of the Deep South.

In the aftermath of this incident, four officers have been indicted and Chief Daryl Gates is fighting for his job. No less a figure than the Rev. Jesse Jackson has called for the chief’s ouster.

Unfortunately, in Los Angeles, those sworn to protect citizens’ rights instead have heightened racial unrest.

Black communities, according to Assemblyman Curtis Tucker Jr., D-Inglewood, view flashing lights in the rear view mirror with trepidation.

“They don’t know whether justice will be meted out,” he said, “or whether a judge, jury and executioner is pulling up behind them.”

And so the NFL will be deciding where to go from Phoenix.

It has said it will choose between San Diego and Los Angeles. If it is looking for total racial fairness, it might not find it either place.

Indeed, it may not find it in any place.

What happened in Phoenix is not ancient history and neither, unfortunately, is racism.