Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

I don't mind if a statue of an American civil rights leader is outsourced to an overseas firm. But if the designer is the same guy who designed Mao statues for Communist China, well that's just cruel.

And there's the unanswered question of whether slave labor might have been employed in the statue's creation.

Even Maya Angelou finds fault with the memorial:
On Feb. 4, 1968, two months before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a haunting sermon at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church about a eulogy that might be given in the event of his death.

“If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice,” King told the congregation. “Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.”

...

Carved on the north face of the 30-foot-tall granite statue, the inscription reads: I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.

“The quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit,” Angelou, 83, said Tuesday. “He was anything but that. He was far too profound a man for that four-letter word to apply.

“He had no arrogance at all,” she said. “He had a humility that comes from deep inside. The ‘if’ clause that is left out is salient. Leaving it out changes the meaning completely.”
The crossed arms strike me as more appropriate for Bull Connor than Martin Luther King, Jr. It's a "look on my works, ye mighty, and despair" sort of posture. I think this pose woudl have been more appropriate. (Yes, that's from the "I Have A Dream" speech.")

Recycle the Chicom marble and start all over. Maybe someone could buy up some of that marble to make a Tiananmen Square monument - in Taipei.

Labels: Culture, History