By Nat Krieger
An archeologist honing her professional chops in 4015 could be forgiven for concluding that the marble and granite ruins in Washington D.C.’s Monument Valley were temples, each devoted to a deified human,
By Nat Krieger
An archeologist honing her professional chops in 4015 could be forgiven for concluding that the marble and granite ruins in Washington D.C.’s Monument Valley were temples, each devoted to a deified human, or perhaps a god who took human form. If only it were so simple.
Those of us living in the third century of the republic know these were mortals. For one thing they’re all dead. Among the sons of the South for example, Thomas Jefferson has remained dead for 189 years, Martin Luther King for 48. The sanctity of their memorials’ dutifully hushed spaces is fortified and mocked by the swinging elbows of ideas, dreams, hypocrisies, even dodgy ruminations on the roles of the architect and the visitors–all stuff we can’t declare dead, or even quantify.
Echoes from gunshots in a Charleston church whip through the Jefferson Memorial where we find the founding father whose greed and guilt marked him with a racism so extreme he denied his own children. Cries of celebration as the Confederate battle flag is lowered in the birthplace of Secession are also carried by a southern wind up the Potomac, past Jefferson, and across the Tidal Basin, where they pause to caress the improbably alabaster statue of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Products of the shadow world trapping the memorialized dead, the preacher from Georgia and the Virginian slave owner have exchanged colors. If his own bronze statue became breathing flesh Jefferson would be a mulatto—and according to the one drop rule by which the author of the Declaration of Independence lived this alternate self would be black. And if a master of Voudon was able to breathe life into the statue of Dr. King, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize would be 30 feet tall and whiter than Lester Maddox.
Before you see Dr. King you find his words. Coming out of a wooded foot path that follows the curve of the Tidal Basin’s shoreline, you pull even with a polished grey stone wall incised with the hope he voiced on many different occasions:
“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
The next section of wall speaks of how only love can drive out hate, and of the next four quotations that together comprise the memorial’s southern wall only one, articulating King’s opposition to the Vietnam War, mentions any specific or uniquely American issue. The Martin Luther King of world peace and international justice is all over the memorial. Except for one 1955 quote from Montgomery on the northern wall the civil rights leader, not to mention the clear eyed tactician, is absent. Odd in the nation’s capital, where slave markets continued to function until 1850 and slavery was only abolished one year into the Civil War (with generous compensation to the owners), a city where public accommodations remained segregated for a century more. Perhaps it’s the aftermath of the terrorist murders in a historic center of anti-racist resistance, a 200 year old black church where King preached, but the absence of the local and the Southern in his memorial leaves a void where some soul and guts could be.
And if there was ever an American public figure with guts, it was Dr. King. No other individual memorialized on the nation’s mall ever faced 15 years of continuous threats on his life and his family. None of his fellow honorees was jailed 29 times, stabbed once—almost fatally, hit in the temple with a rock, and struck on multiple occasions.
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience and comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” Inscribed on the memorial’s northern wall, King lived his words in their full painful meaning during a 1962 speech in Birmingham, Alabama, when an American Nazi named Roy James ran onto the stage and sent one punch after another crashing into King’s face. There came a moment when the 6’2”, 200 lb. attacker paused. Bleeding from his mouth and nose the 5’7’’ King regained his balance, turned purposefully towards his attacker, dropped his hands, and looked into the Nazi’s eyes. By then King’s stunned aides had reached James. “Don’t touch him, don’t touch him”, King’s baritone rang out. “We have to pray for him.” And that’s exactly what they did. King then took his attacker into a room off the stage where they spoke. Later, King refused to press charges, although the city of Birmingham did.
In the words of King Biographer Marshall Frady, “To hallow a figure is almost always to hollow him.” It is because Martin Luther King was a human being who struggled with his own demons and doubts and fears that his bravery makes him, at 5’7’’, a giant among men. In this sense his statue’s enormous size feels right; true it does not make him an intimate, like the brown, life sized statue of Rosa Parks in the Capitol building, but there is no denying the ancient link between honor and bigness. Part of what makes the Lincoln Memorial so evocative is Abe’s Olympian size. There is also Dr. King’s public style which was both grand and formal. This was not because he was a stuffed shirt. Those who knew him testify to MLK’s humor and approachability in private. King’s public persona served as an elegant, overpowering corrective to centuries old caricatures of African American men by the dominant culture.
Unli