The following is a recent column I wrote for our local newspaper The Spectrum.
Recently I learned about the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington DC scheduled for Sunday August 28. Somewhat impulsively, I decided to travel to Washington to visit family and attend the dedication ceremony.
While hurricane Irene caused the postponement of the dedication to September or October the memorial was unveiled the day before I arrived in Washington. I visited the memorial twice and attended related ceremonies experiencing with others feelings of joy, reverence, appreciation, and more aroused by this memorial to the man who moved our nation towards greater racial and economic justice.
During my lifetime I have seen legalized segregation poison our national soul. I recall the deaths of civil rights workers in the sixties, the protest of Rosa Parks when she refused to go to the back of the bus, the use of police dogs by Eugene “Bull” Connor, the murder of Medgar Evers, the Ku Klux Klan marching down Main street in my home town in Georgia in the seventies, and many more events during our long struggle for civil rights.
Dr. King emerged from this chaos and gave voice to the hopes and aspirations of those engaged in the battle. In his Letter from the Birmingham Jail Dr. King addressed fellow clergymen concerned about the potential negative reactions to the peaceful civil rights marches and demonstrations. He enumerated in great detail the injustices suffered by the Negroes and argued that the time for patience had passed. Even though President Truman desegregated the military after World War II and the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of the schools in 1954, we were still a segregated nation in 1963 when Dr. King spoke on August 28 at the Washington Mall to 250,000 people. He spoke of his dream that he would see our nation realize the goals of equality and justice spelled out in our founding documents. He dreamed of a time when his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Dr. King spoke about letting freedom ring from the mountaintops including Stone Mountain of Georgia. The design of the memorial has Dr. King emerging from a large granite rock that itself has emerged from a break in the stone mountain that forms the entrance to the memorial on the shore of the Tidal Basin.
On the day before his assassination in 1968 he spoke, prophetically sadly, of having been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land.
Standing at the foot of his 30-foot high memorial looking toward the Thomas Jefferson Memorial I was reminded of the ideals expressed by Jefferson during the birth of our nation, humbled by the awareness that our journey is not yet finished.
We each bring ourselves to the experience of art and our personal response is evoked. As with the heavily criticized Vietnam Memorial, the public response to this memorial will establish its meaning in future years.
