Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial

Between the Lincoln Memorial and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, there is a granite passage: two enormous boulders are set apart, and the figure of Martin Luther King Jr. emerges from a third boulder brought forward. In this way, the creators translated into stone an image from his Washington speech about hope carved from despair. A separate memorial at the National Mall was dedicated to King as a Baptist pastor and one of the leaders of the movement against racial segregation, which sought change through nonviolent campaigns. The line between the monuments to Lincoln and Jefferson recalls the emancipation of enslaved people and the promise of equality set down in the Declaration of Independence.

Long horizontal grooves are visible on the northeastern side of the Stone of Hope. This is not a place for a future inscription. Text was already here: it was carved before the memorial opened, then removed two years later.

Martin Luther King Jr., whose figure emerges from a granite boulder, was a Baptist pastor and a leader of the movement against racial segregation. He sought change through nonviolent campaigns; under their pressure, the United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty-four and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 the following year. For this work, King received the Nobel Peace Prize, and after his murder he became the first African American to be honored with a separate memorial at the National Mall.

The memorial’s design comes from his “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in nineteen sixty-three. King said that a Stone of Hope could be carved from a Mountain of Despair. The architects turned the phrase into a passage between two granite sections of the Mountain of Despair and brought forward a third boulder—the Stone of Hope, with King’s figure. They placed it on the line between the Lincoln Memorial and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial: in that speech, King recalled both the emancipation of enslaved people under Lincoln and the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence, written by Jefferson.

The disputed inscription came from another speech. In February nineteen sixty-eight, two months before his murder, King delivered a sermon in Atlanta’s Ebenezer Church about the desire to be first. He called it The Drum Major Instinct—the instinct of someone who marches ahead of an orchestra and leads a parade. King warned the congregation that the desire to be out front easily turns into arrogance. He then imagined his own funeral and asked that his awards not be listed. If anyone wished to call him a drum major, King said, let them call him a drum major of justice, peace, and righteousness—a person who tried to serve others.

The full passage of forty-seven words was approved for the memorial. But during the work, executive architect Ed Jackson Jr. decided to move the central phrase—about the Mountain of Despair—to the first visible side of the Stone of Hope. There was no longer enough prepared space on the opposite side for the long sermon. Jackson made the decision himself and shortened King’s words to ten: “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.” The conditional phrase “if you want to say” disappeared. The warning against vanity came to resemble self-praise.

The poet Maya Angelou, who knew King and had been invited to advise the memorial’s creators, demanded that the inscription be corrected. She said the shortening made King look like a presumptuous fool. The preacher’s son, Martin Luther King III, confirmed it: his father did not speak of himself that way. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar ordered that the words’ original meaning be restored.

Replacing the short phrase with the full one proved dangerous for the boulder itself: the letters had been cut deeply, and inserting a new piece of granite would have left additional seams in the sculpture. Then the author of the figure, the Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin, proposed continuing the grooves over the letters—the grooves that already covered the edges of the Stone of Hope. King’s family agreed to preserve the granite at the cost of losing the inscription. In nineteen thirteen, Lei returned here and personally chiseled away the words.

A line from King’s Washington speech is still carved on the southern side of the Stone of Hope. On the northeastern side, where there was once an attempt to speak for him, only grooves remain.