Martin Luther King Jr Family Martin Luther King Jr Memorial
NPS / Nathan King
Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Martin Luther Rex, Jr. Memorial is located in West Potomac Park at 1964 Independence Artery, S.Due west., referencing the year the Civil Rights Act Of 1964 became law. The memorial's official dedication date is August 28, 2011, the 48th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, though the ceremony was postponed until October 16 due to Hurricane Irene.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Baptist minister and social activist who became a notable figure during the U.S. civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until he was assassinated in 1968. He played a pivotal office in ending the legal segregation of African American citizens in the U.Due south., influencing the cosmos of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Deed of 1965. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, among other honors.
King's memorial is the commencement to honor an African American individual on the National Mall. The space is a place to contemplate Martin Luther Male monarch, Jr.'southward legacy: a not-tearing philosophy striving for freedom, justice, and equality.
Courtesy Roma Design Group
Selecting the Design
In 1996, Congress authorized Martin Luther Male monarch, Jr.'due south fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, to establish a Memorial to him in Washington, DC. The Martin Luther Rex, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation held a blueprint competition and identified the Tidal Basin site for the memorial'southward location.
For the pattern competition, entrants' registration materials contained ten posters with images and chronology of Dr. Rex'due south life, information about the memorial'due south site in DC, and the Foundation's vision for the memorial. Each prospective designer submitted iii 24" ten 36" display boards to an international panel of artists, historians, and architects. A full of 906 entrants joined the competition, though jurors only knew the registration number of each entry. Subsequently three days, the panel narrowed the submissions down to 23 finalists. Unable to accomplish a decision, the jury asked the 23 finalists to submit a fourth lath.
In 2000, the judges selected ROMA Blueprint Grouping's plan for a stone with Dr. King's image emerging from a mount. The plan's theme referenced a line from Rex's 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech: "With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mount of despair a rock of hope." The final design includes a massive carved mount with a slice pulled out of it, symbolizing the "Stone of Hope" beingness hewn from the "Mountain of Despair." Reinforcing this motif, the edges of the Rock of Hope and the Mountain of Despair contain scrape marks to symbolize the struggle and movement, as well as an engraving of the words "Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope." Visitors may enter the memorial through the Mountain of Despair and tour the memorial reflecting on the struggle that Dr. Male monarch faced during his life, approaching the plaza where the Stone of Promise stands. In the rock, a carving of Dr. Male monarch gazes to the horizon, thoughtful and resolute.
NPS / Ned Wallace
Creating the Sculpture
To create the likeness of Dr. King, the Foundation searched for a sculptor. Their search led them to St. Paul, MN, where an international collection of sculptors were creating public artwork to be installed throughout the urban center. Later on budgeted all 15 artists, they found that iv of them recommended the Chinese artist Master Lei Yixin. After the Foundation interviewed him in Washington, DC, and examined his work in People's republic of china, Master Lei Yixin became the official sculptor in 2007.
Lei filled the walls of his studio with hundreds of photographs of Dr. King, and studied them until he held the essence of the man's spirit firmly in his mind. He created a three-foot scale model of the sculpture amongst other sculpture models, before sculpting the thirty-foot last version. Along the manner, Lei worked closely with the Foundation and the Male monarch family unit to choose the material — shrimp pinkish granite — and to generate the likeness reflected in the final production.
A 30 foot fiberglass replica of the entire sculpture served as a reference for the stone sculpture. The sculpture and the mountain are composed of 159 granite blocks that were transported to Principal Lei's studio in Changsha, Red china, where he assembled and sculpted 80 percentage of the artwork. It was so disassembled and transported by ship to Baltimore, and reassembled at the memorial. Master Lei completed the final 20 pct of the sculpting on site in Washington, D.C.
Nick Benson and his team completed the text engravings that captured King'due south words. Benson, a 3rd generation stone carver, spent more than than two years on the project. His company, The John Stevens Shop, is located in Newport, Rhode Island. He is both a designer and a carver, with distinctive architectural lettering that is an original font cartoon on both classical Greek forms and contemporary sans serif script. His other engraving works include the Earth War II Memorial, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island, and the National Gallery of Art.
NPS / Nib Shugarts
Symbolism
Each part of the memorial is significant and symbolic. From the looming Mount of Despair, a Stone of Hope surges forward as the focal point for the memorial. This references a line in Rex'south spoken communication, "With this faith, we will exist able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope." At that place, the striking likeness of Dr. Male monarch captured him in a moment of reflective thought, determined and resolute. The detachment of the Stone of Hope from the Mount of Despair symbolizes victory borne from disappointment. A wall of quotes spanning Dr. Rex'southward long civil rights career represents his ideals of peace, democracy, justice, and love. As much as the quotes acknowledge the history of the civil rights struggle in America, they tin keep to serve as inspiration to others fighting for civil rights effectually the globe.
The memorial'southward location is too pregnant, enhancing the core of the "city beautiful" that Pierre L'Enfant envisioned in 1791, and the McMillan Plan expanded in 1901. The plans aimed to create an entire city to remind us "what we should be trying to achieve as a nation, as a society [and] every bit human being beings on this planet." For the "I Have a Dream" speech, Rex stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and referenced the Declaration of Independence, penned past Thomas Jefferson. King leveraged the power of identify to appeal to cadre American values that all Americans held honey, highlighting the injustice perpetuated by segregation. The Martin Luther Male monarch, Jr. Memorial'southward location forth the line connecting the Thomas Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials helps to reinforce the connectedness betwixt these three leaders at three important moments for civil rights in our nation'due south history: from the promise that "all men are created equal," to the freeing of the slaves, to the concluding push button for full and equal rights.
NPS / Nathan King
Drum Major Quote Controversy
Upon opening in 2011, the memorial immediately faced controversy due to a paraphrased quote inscribed on the Stone of Promise: "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness." The inscription sparked controversy when writer and poet Maya Angelou said it made Male monarch "expect like an arrogant twit." King'due south original words from a February 4, 1968 sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta were, "If you desire to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things volition not matter."
The sermon largely dealt with the theme of the danger of the personal ego driving people and nations to live beyond their means and seek attention and supremacy to negative ends, closing with Martin Luther Male monarch request his congregation to turn that desire to stand out — to exist a drum major — into service to others. In the sermon, King wished aloud not to exist remembered for his awards and education, merely that he "tried to give his life serving others," and that he "tried to love and serve humanity." The message of selflessness embodied in the sermon seemed to be at odds with what was captured on the memorial.
On December eleven, 2012, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar appear his decision to remove the controversial quote by carving striations over the words, which would alloy in with the existing artwork. In 2013, sculptor Lei Yixin returned to change the memorial and remove the quote. The paraphrased quote is no longer visible.
Quotations
Study Martin Luther Male monarch, Jr.'due south quotes engraved in the memorial.
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Source: https://www.nps.gov/mlkm/learn/building-the-memorial.htm
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