WASHINGTON —President Barack Obama and civil rights
leaders on Sunday helped dedicate a memorial to the Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr. with thousands of spectators watching, almost two months after
it was originally scheduled to be dedicated.
Obama,
the nation’s first black president, who benefited enormously from the
victories won by the civil rights movement, called King a man who
“somehow gave voice to our deepest dreams and our most lasting ideals, a
man who stirred our conscience and thereby helped make our union more
perfect.”
The centerpiece of the national
memorial, the first on the National Mall honoring a non-president and an
African-American, is a 30-foot-high, 12-foot-wide granite sculpture of
King with his arms crossed. Nearby, a white granite wall displays 14
quotations from King’s speeches and writings.
Facing
the Tidal Basin, the King memorial, which cost $120 million and opened
Aug. 22, stands between the Lincoln Memorial and the Thomas Jefferson
Memorial on the National Mall.
“It’s a good
feeling just to look at him, a black man that made it to this level, to
have him statueized,” said Johnita Cox, 70, a retired nursing assistant
from Jackson, Ala. She took the train up to Washington and visited the
memorial with a friend.
She recalled that when she
and other black friends walked on the sidewalk to school, they had to
step aside when white people came close. She said bricks would sometimes
be thrown through the windows of her house.
“Never
in my wildest dreams did I think this man, Martin Luther King, would be
memorialized right there. I wouldn’t have missed this for anything,”
Cox said.
The message of Obama’s dedication
speech, which began with some in the audience chanting “four more years”
and touched on themes of fighting to overcome the hardships faced by
King, seemed to echo some of the challenges faced by the president
himself. Those challenges include repairing a weak economy beset by high
unemployment,t and fighting against a sense that some Americans have
that the nation is in decline.
“As tough as times
may be, I know we will overcome. I know there are better days ahead. I
know this because of the man towering over us,” he said at the end of
his speech.
“Let us keep striving; let us keep
struggling; let us keep climbing toward that promised land of a nation
and a world that is more fair, and more just and more equal for every
single child of God.”
The ceremony, attended by a
mostly African-American crowd, many wearing white hats bearing the
slogan “Celebrate the Life, Dream, Legacy,” was a mix of speeches from
people who knew King and musical interludes from artists such as Aretha
Franklin, Stevie Wonder and James Taylor.
The
memorial had been scheduled to be dedicated on Aug. 28, the 48th
anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” but Hurricane Irene
forced a postponement.
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One
of those attending was Ernie Thomas, 71, a retired 20-year Air Force
officer and state government employee, who flew to Washington from
Moreno Valley, Calif.
“I think the memorial was
long overdue,” he said while waiting in an early morning line to get in.
He came with his wife and two adult daughters.
“I
didn’t think I ever would see this day, bottom line, in my lifetime
because things were moving in a slow pace and we had a lot of obstacles
along the way,” he said. He told of “extreme racism” when he served in
South Carolina for the Air Force from 1959 to 1964.
Valentine
Antony, 25, a student at Appalachian State University, drove to
Washington from North Carolina with his girlfriend for an economic
justice rally on Saturday. He said the ideals that King stood for have
not been fully realized yet.
Antony noted how
King’s figure is not fully etched into the statue and compared that to
the status of the civil rights and economic justice movements.
“The
dream is still needing to be completed and fulfilled. He’s walking
forward and he’s asking us to carve the rest out. We still have a lot of
work to do,” he said.
Other people who traveled
to see the monument and attend the dedication came to both witness
history and remind their children about a man whose legacy continues to
affect people today, more than 40 years after he was assassinated.
Marcus
Johnson, 42, from Spartanburg, S.C., a federal Defense Department
information technology employee, drove up with his wife, Angela, and
their children .
“I was born after the civil
rights movement, but I want my kids to understand what their
grandparents and my grandparents had to endure in their lifetimes to
give them the privileges that I have right now and what they have,”
Johnson said.
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©2011 the McClatchy Washington Bureau
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