Organizers of MLK memorial quicken pace to get slain leader among greats
Organizers of a King memorial hope to break ground on the National Mall in November, placing the civil rights leader in the same class as Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They are accelerating their efforts to raise enough money to begin construction and complete the project in 2008, the 40th anniversary of King's death.
"We want to create a sense of urgency," says Harry Johnson Sr., president of the Washington-based Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation.
The memorial, to be located on 4 acres adjacent to the FDR memorial, will be midway between the Jefferson Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial where King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963. It will include waterfalls and a granite boulder from which an image of King emerges.
When built, the memorial will be the first on the Mall dedicated to a non-president and an African-American.
The memorial "is tantamount to the recognition of the people who made the second American Revolution," says Ron Walters, director of the African American Leadership Institute and a politics professor at the University of Maryland. "We're beginning to get away from looking at Martin Luther King as just a black hero."
King has become a "national icon," says Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia University in New York who specializes in race relations. "It's hard to think of another private citizen being in a position to get this kind of recognition." He says the memorial, though a symbol, is "tremendously significant."
Foner says the memorial may reflect a change in the last two decades in the nation's capital, where some slaves helped build the U.S. Capitol and others were sold on Pennsylvania Avenue. In 1983, when a federal holiday was proposed to honor King, President Reagan initially opposed it. Last year, the Senate issued the first congressional apology to African-Americans by passing a resolution that laments its failure to stop lynching.
The memorial was the brainchild of activists from Alpha Phi Alpha, an African-American fraternity of which King was a member. They've campaigned for it for two decades.
Before bulldozers can arrive, organizers must raise $66 million of the expected $100 million cost. So far, they have raised $43.5 million, although Congress has pledged $10 million in matching funds and several big corporate donors will soon step in, says Rica Orszag, the project's spokeswoman.
The memorial, which Congress authorized in 1996, has been beset by delays and a languid pace of donations. Organizers have repeatedly failed to reach fundraising targets, although hefty donations have come from celebrities including filmmaker George Lucas ($1 million) and corporations, including General Motors ($10 million), Tommy Hilfiger Corp. ($5 million) and the National Basketball Association ($3 million.)
"I'm just waiting to see if it will happen," says John Hope Franklin, 90, a professor emeritus of history at Duke University. "I've been disillusioned so many times before. It's 2006, and there's nothing in the nation's capital to show what happened to African-Americans. Nothing."