For all Martin Luther King, Jr. articles, please go to:
Belief with Wings
I Have a Nightmare
Virtual Deity
Crowd Pleaser
Stone Cold
“The heretofore is just as important as the hereafter, ” wrote Michel Tournier, “especially as it probably holds the key to it.” The future of American race relations—our communal hereafter—has a large stake in the character of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, King gave one of the most commanding political speeches of 20th-century America. “I Have a Dream,” delivered in the cadences of a Baptist sermon, stirred the collective conscience of a people. A compelling orator, King prompted the nation to consummate its own founding ideals and abolish the scandal of racial division. He gave soaring voice to the aspirations of Black Americans and articulated the ethos of his times. Without a doubt, King is owed a memorial in the company of statesmen. But whether he—and we—deserve this particular one is less clear.
The byways and limited victories of historical reality are too many and too intricate for formal commemoration. This 4-acre memorial on the National Mall enshrines King’s iconic status in the American imagination and communal memory. In doing so, it necessarily erases the continuum of which he was part. Granted, monumental sculpture is intended to transpose into image those myths chosen to become artifacts of memory—that is its public function. Still, the grandiose aura of sanctity that informs the King memorial tilts toward idolatry. It carries a certain falsity, a hint of bathos, that speaks more poignantly of our own cultural moment than of his.
The historic Civil Rights Movement was larger than even its most charismatic prolocutor. It was the culmination of a dynamic, evolving odyssey with roots reaching past the abolitionists, past the agony of Gettysburg, the 13th Amendment and the first (ineffectual) Civil Rights Act of 1875. It encompasses the years of the Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. It stretches back to 1794 and the first congressional act against the slave trade.
If the movement in its modern phase can be plausibly fixed in any specific moment or event, it would reside in Harry Truman’s 1948 Executive Order 9981, desegregating the military. Place another mark on the timeline six years later: In 1954, the Supreme Court put paid to de jure segregation in education and the assumption of separate but equal.
The movement was an accelerating progression in which countless names participated and made salient contributions. It suffered martyrs, Medgar Evers and King among them. The 1964 killing of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner—two young black men and one white man—was emblematic of its biracial engagement. The civil rights revolution succeeded because the justice of it was embraced by the nation at large. The moral courage of black-led marches, boycotts and sit-ins struck an answering chord in the white majority. Whites, too, stood at stations along the bloody via crucis traveled by black Americans.
What the memorial’s fundraisers invoke as “Dr. King’s spiritual presence” was hardly his alone. It was his inheritance from evangelical Protestantism, the spirit that fueled American abolitionist revulsion against the moral schism at the heart of a slave-owning culture. King was the William Lloyd Garrison for the Jim Crow era. It detracts nothing from King’s achievement to acknowledge his place in a redemptive chain of persons and events. Quite the contrary, the survival of our common cultural identity requires it. Yet here among the cherry blossoms of the Tidal Basin, King is solemnized in architectural terms that suggest a lone giant of biblical proportions: Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt.
Visitors wander an inscription wall carrying quotations from King’s speeches and sermons. Chosen to confirm him as a timeless spokesman for the Everyman, the selections mute his specificity. There are those hazy, universalist pieties (e.g. an injunction to “develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole”) that can flatter any utopian purpose, fair or foul. Few testify to the quintessential American quality of King’s mission, grounded in the American experience and scriptural trust in the sanctity of the individual.
The bedrock from which King emerged was the Christian faith in its American Protestant manifestation. “The Lord is my Rock, my fortress and my deliverer,” quoth the psalmist. But here King himself is the Rock: the mawkishly named “Stone of Hope,” a 30-foot granite monolith that suggests a one-man Mount Rushmore.
The $120 million colossus, quarried and carved in the People’s Republic of China, stands 11 feet higher than Daniel Chester French’s figure of Lincoln, but with none of its humanity. King’s obdurate stance—arms crossed, face as impassive as a Stalin-era Buddha—bespeaks the aesthetic of a sculptor on stipend from the Chinese government for a succession of public monuments, including several of the murderous Mao. Now, the triumphal banality of socialist realism rises across the Potomac from the symbolic neoclassicism of the Jefferson Memorial. The disjunction in sensibility is jarring.
Visitors approach the Stone of Hope through a breach in the “Mountain of Despair.” A pair of two massive boulders mirroring each other, the Mountain pretends to part like the Red Sea. Pulled from King’s own words, its name leans on John Bunyan’s allegorical slough of despond or hill of difficulty—a reminder that Pilgrim’s Progress, in the full phrasing of its title, was also “delivered under the similitude of a dream.” Visually, however, the tripartite monument best resembles a prop from Return of the Jedi. We can only wonder why the sculpture commission was not awarded on the basis of an audition, as was the landscape design. Lei Yixin was simply called, like an apostle, to the job.
In sum, the memorial disconcerts. The monument itself is a brutish incongruity in a graceful setting. More significantly, inflated focus on a virtually deified figure impoverishes our understanding of America’s pilgrimage toward witness, in fullness and truth, to the proposition that all men are created equal.
