It’s another chapter in the long-running debate over how many monuments should be permitted in the expanse known as America’s Front Yard.
After years of public squabbling over how many memorials is too many, a seven-acre homage to World War II was plunked in the middle of the National Mall in 2004. Congress then declared the cherished space known as America’s Front Yard an “essentially finished work of art,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
Even so, a memorial to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr will open this month on four acres near the Tidal Basin where the cherry blossoms bloom.
“To say the Mall is complete strikes us as essentially saying American history has come to a screeching halt, and no one believes that,” said Judy Scott Feldman, chairman of the Maryland-based National Coalition to Save Our Mall.
The King Memorial is scheduled to open on Sunday, the anniversary of Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. The dedication, which will cap a five-day celebration, could draw as many as 400,000 people – nearly twice the number who took part in the 1963 March on Washington.
It also marks another chapter in a debate that has simmered for decades over the dangers of overdeveloping the National Mall, designed by Pierre L’Enfant in 1791 as a geographic embodiment of the Constitution.
Its great cross axis stretches east to west from the US Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, and north to south from the White House to the Jefferson Memorial. Its grand promenade is where millions gather to celebrate, mourn, protest and learn, according to Los Angeles Times.
The tribute to Martin Luther King brings to nine the number of major memorials on the National Mall.
The $120-million King Memorial will be the only one on the Mall that doesn’t honour a President or a war. An inscription wall captures his legacy with quotes etched in granite; a 30-foot sculpture captures his image, arms crossed.
Martin Luther King was born as Michael Luther King, Jr, but later had his name changed to Martin.
With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. They had two sons and two daughters.
Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, Martin Luther King was a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the leading organisation of its kind in the nation.
In December, 1955, he accepted the leadership of the first great Negro non-violent demonstration of contemporary times in the US, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honour of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals.
During these days of boycott, Martin Luther King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.
In 1957 he was elected President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organisation formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organisation he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Mahatma Gandhi. Between 1957 and 1968, he travelled over six million miles and spoke over 25,000 times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest and action. He wrote five books as well as numerous articles.
He directed the peaceful March on Washington, made up of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, l Have a Dream. At 35, Martin Luther King, Jr, was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.
He was assassinated on April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city.