Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial

Last week’s brush with Hurricane Irene caused the ceremonial dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial on the National Mall to be indefinitely postponed. That doesn’t mean that the memorial isn’t open for business, however. In fact, my colleague, Michael McCandlish, and I spent part of yesterday afternoon at the site, four acres of hallowed ground on the Tidal Basin between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. As usual, the opening of a new memorial on the Mall has been marked by controversy.

To begin with, charges of “profiteering” have issued from critics offended by the King family’s insistence that they be paid licensing fees for use of Dr. King's image.

Then there was a dust-up when it was revealed that Lei Yixin, a Chinese sculptor noted for his work on a statue of Mao Zedong, had been commissioned to use Chinese laborers to sculpt Dr. King’s likeness from an enormous piece of Chinese granite. Naturally, none of this sat well with African American artists or U.S. labor unions.

The completed composition is said to express the idea of a “stone of hope” emerging from a “mountain of despair,” the stone in this case being a colossal image of the martyred Civil Rights leader (see photo above). There are those who say the sculpture doesn’t look much like Dr. King, or that his facial expression is wrong. Others complain about its alleged “Stalinist” overtones. I’ll confess that the sculpture looks to me like a faithful rendering of Dr. King, and I would think that the National Mall might be the one place in America where bombast on a colossal scale seems right at home.

Now it turns out that Maya Angelou and others are unhappy with the inscriptions that adorn the central composition and the surrounding stone wall. Their grievance has to do mainly with a passage on the side of the central sculpture that reads “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness,” though without the quotation marks, because the passage was abridged and yanked out of context from one of Dr. King's speeches. Angelou says that the resulting inscription makes him sound like an “arrogant twit.” I’m not sure I see that, but I agree that it’s trivializing, which is to say not appropriate for a memorial, where dignity and sense of decorum count for a lot.

I found the memorial moving, and definitely worth the trip. It brought back memories of the man of peace and of how polarizing his message was at the time. It’s a little unsettling to reflect on the many ways that later generations manage to dishonor fallen heroes--usually unwittingly, and often by sanitizing their disturbing messages. Even the formal study of history, a noble calling too often treated as just one damn thing after another, can have the same effect.

A case in point: In the early 1990s, I was in Memphis, Tennessee, to attend a meeting of faculty members and administrators from many of the nation’s historically black colleges and universities. The organizers had arranged for us to have a private tour of the newly opened National Civil Rights Museum, which was very cleverly designed to incorporate the Loraine Motel, where Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, as part of the museum. As it happened, the young woman who served as our tour guide was a history graduate student, and she had memorized a script containing what seemed like an infinite number of arcane factoids and random statistics more or less bearing on the Civil Rights movement. But it was all book-learnin’, stuff suitable for cramming on the night before the final exam. For her, Martin Luther King, Jr., was nothing more than a name in a textbook.

Not so for my colleagues on the tour. Most had participated in boycotts, sit-ins, and demonstrations during their youth. Some had been arrested. Some had traveled to Washington for Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. They had seen Jim Crow up close, and felt his wrath. They were moved by the National Civil Rights Museum, and visibly distraught and embarrassed by the tour guide who, not having lived through the Civil Rights Era, was simply tone-deaf to its drama. As mementoes, factoids just don't cut it.