How Forest Avenue Became MLK Boulevard in Dallas

Elsie Faye Heggins won a seat on the Dallas City Council in 1980, and South Dallas knew exactly what it meant.

Her election did not simply add a new face to city government. It opened a door for something larger: a systematic effort to reshape South Dallas in the image of the people who actually lived there. Heggins and her neighbors wasted no time. They drew up plans that would have seemed audacious anywhere else but made complete sense to a Black community that had spent generations watching a city define itself without them.

Scholar Edward Sebesta, in his document “Struggles Over Street Names in Dallas,” lays out the scope of Heggins’ vision. She proposed renaming Interstate 45 the Ralph Bunche Freeway. State Highway 352 would become Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Oakland Avenue would take the name Malcolm X Avenue. And one of several candidates for a Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard would come from Forest Avenue, Kiest Boulevard, or Cedar Crest Boulevard.

The list reads like a declaration. These were not modest requests tacked onto a city council agenda. They were a blueprint for spatial storytelling, a way of writing Black excellence and Black struggle directly into the infrastructure of Dallas.

The first piece of that blueprint moved quickly. On April 8, 1981, the Dallas City Council passed an ordinance renaming Forest Avenue as Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The street was not a minor side road. It served as a primary gateway connecting South Dallas to Fair Park and Oak Cliff, carrying the weight of everyday life for thousands of residents. Putting King’s name on that corridor was a statement about whose city Dallas actually was.

The photograph from June 1982, preserved in the Dallas Public Library’s History and Archives Division, captures Heggins and others holding the new street sign aloft. The image carries the energy of a community that fought for something specific and won it.

What we name our streets and schools and civic buildings is never neutral. Every name is a choice, and those choices accumulate into a city’s self-portrait. In Dallas, South Dallas residents have consistently pushed against a portrait that left them out. The renaming of Forest Avenue was one battle in that longer effort to control the narrative.

That struggle has never been isolated to South Dallas alone. The Confederate monuments and street names that stitched a particular version of history into the urban fabric of Dallas were not accidental. They were decisions made at specific moments by people who understood exactly what they were doing.

The connection between street names, public space, and political power became impossible to ignore in 2017, when Charlottesville, Virginia’s city council voted to remove a Confederate statue of Robert E. Lee. The backlash was violent. Richard Spencer, who grew up in Preston Hollow and attended St. Mark’s School of Texas, helped organize a march of white nationalists through the University of Virginia campus on August 11 of that year. Marchers carrying tiki torches chanted slogans tied to white replacement theory and antisemitism. The next day, the larger “Unite The Right Rally” drew hundreds more to Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee Park. Counter-protesters were attacked. Dozens were injured. A white nationalist drove a car into a crowd and killed a woman named Heather Heyer.

The thread connecting a neo-Nazi rally in Virginia to a Preston Hollow upbringing to a Dallas street sign is not a detour. It is the point. Decisions about what gets named, what gets commemorated, and whose story gets told in public space carry real political stakes. They always have.

Heggins understood this clearly in 1980. The renaming of Forest Avenue was not an act of symbolism disconnected from material life. It was an assertion that South Dallas residents belonged to their city, that their history mattered, and that the built environment could either reflect that truth or deny it.

The boulevard bearing Martin Luther King Jr.’s name still runs through South Dallas today. Public art depicting the civil rights era marks its intersection with South Malcolm X Boulevard. The names are there. The work of making the city match them continues.