Before becoming well-known throughout the world as a boxing promoter in 1966, Don King killed one of his old bookmaking staff members with a stomp because the man owed King $600. At the time of sentence, the judge dropped the second-degree murder allegation against King in favour of non-negligent manslaughter. Governor Jim Rhodes of Ohio at the time pardoned King in 1984 after he had served nearly four years in jail for the murder.
Situated exactly along a section of road that two Cleveland City Council members now want to rename Don King Way, the event took place in front of the Manhattan Tap Room, a now-closed pub in Cleveland at East 100th Street and Cedar Avenue.
I suppose only in America?
Leila Atassi of Cleveland.com reports that the original plan of the City Council was to rename a different route in honour of the 85-year-old promoter. The road is located near an African-American newspaper that King has owned since 1998. Instead, Don King Way would be the new name for Cedar Avenue between East 36th Street and Stokes Boulevard, according to legislation that Council members Mamie Mitchell and Phyllis Cleveland filed last month. The site of the 1966 event is located in the eastern portion of that stretch of road.
Don King Way would now only go from East 71st Street to Stokes Boulevard. Atassi was unable to obtain a response from any of the Council members, but on Monday a committee of the Council deliberated changing the boundaries of the honorary road. That wouldn’t change anything: The spot of the 1966 homicide would still be pretty much right in the middle.
Even though King has given millions of dollars to Cleveland-area charities, some other members of the Cleveland City Council are not happy about all of this. Monday’s finance committee meeting will reexamine the matter, according to President Kevin Kelley, who spoke with Fox 8 TV about it.
As the City Council continues to examine its choices with Don King Way, the Cleveland Browns will install a statue of NFL star Jim Brown before Sunday’s home game against the Baltimore Ravens. There is no denying Brown’s accomplishments to the NFL and the field of social justice. Thus, according to Diana Moskovitz of Deadspin:
Brown is an archetypal person who’s presented the way he is because he sits, as much as anyone now living, at the crossroads of the athletic and political. In addition, this individual has been the subject of allegations and inquiries of at least six separate incidents of beating or raping women over a number of decades, from the 1960s to the year 2000. Three of those cases led to charges being tried in front of juries; the other three were dismissed when the women indicated they had no intention of pursuing charges or when their cooperating witnesses ceased to testify. He admits in his own memoir to slapping women, and in another case blamed violent outbursts on his wife having her period. He was found guilty once—of vandalism—and incarcerated when he refused to go to the domestic abuse counselling that the court had mandated in that instance.
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