Saying No to MLK

Metro Council member Rip Ryman, who has been accused of racial insensitivity in the past, cast the only vote against naming an East Nashville street after Martin Luther King Jr.

“There’s Martin Luther King High School,” Ryman says. “There’s Martin Luther King bridge. So I told Pam Murray, ‘If you want to name a street, name the boulevard out there where the bridge is,’ which made sense to me. I don’t think she liked me suggesting that to her. That’s the reason I voted no.”

“It just didn’t make sense to me to have three different things in three different parts of town. I could have just sat there on my hands and not said nothing. It just hit me wrong.”

It was Ryman, you may recall, who used racially indelicate language at a meeting during the city’s fight to stop a Christian ministry’s halfway house for drug addicts and alcoholics from opening in his Goodlettsville district.

According to a subsequent lawsuit by the ministry, Teen Challenge, several black halfway staffers watched as Ryman said of their plans, “I don’t care what you call it. If you want to call it a group home, halfway house, rehabilitation services. They always told me if it walks like a monkey, it swings from a tree like a monkey, it’s gonna be a monkey.”

Ryman says he’s not worried that anyone might begin to think he’s a racist, “because I’m not. I headed up a union for 15 years and when I left, the guy I recommended to take my place was a black guy,” says Ryman, who also worked as an aide to three mayors—Richard Fulton, Bill Boner and Phil Bredesen—before running for the council.