Misquoting Martin Luther King Jr. on His Own Memorial — Lies Have apparently become America’s Only Currency

19 September 2011

It shouldn’t take someone of Maya Angelou’s stature to point out that falsifications on national memorials is a bad thing

Dr. King’s memorial in Washington, D.C. has a grossly distorted “quotation” on it.

Verbal truth was too much for the memorial’s executive architect, so he approved a shortened mishmash of what King actually said. The reworking distorts who King was:

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.”

The sermon was so powerful that the designers of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington selected those lines to be inscribed on the memorial’s towering statue of the civil rights leader.

But because of a design change during the statue’s creation, the exact quotes had to be paraphrased, and now one of the memorial’s best-known consultants, poet and author Maya Angelou, says the shortened inscription is misleading and ought to be changed.

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 paraphrase “minimizes the man,” she said. “It makes him seem less than the humanitarian he was. . . . It makes him seem an egotist.”

It shouldn’t take a poet to tell us this

Angelou’s point should be obvious to anyone with passing familiarity with integrity and English.

The memorial's executive architect, Ed Jackson, Jr. attempted to evade Angelou’s criticism

From National Public Radio:

Today, All Things Considered's Melissa Block spoke to memorial's executive architect, Ed Jackson Jr., who explained the quote was paraphrased because of design constraints.

At first, he said, the quote was going to be placed on the south face of the monument, but instead the designers decided that they wanted visitors to see the quotation ("Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope...") that explained the whole concept first.

So they decided to move the quotation to the north side, where the sculptor had already done some work adding striations that left little room for a lengthy engraving.

That's the technical explanation.

But Jackson also said he disagreed with Angelou. He said the quote did not make King sound arrogant and said the memorial includes 14 other quotations and that the full experience cannot be determined by one small part of it.

Translation of Mr. Jackson’s inane defense

“What’s a lie, when it can be diluted in a bunch of other stuff that viewers can find — if they’re skilled and motivated enough to look?”

Ed Jackson Jr. is obviously not much of a reader, poet, psychologist, historian, or thinker.

Yet he’s the guy passing “written in stone” judgment on King’s un-argued genius with language and soul.

The moral? — Truth is our only defense against barbarities delivered by twits

In a world of lies, nothing is real or sacred.

Even the great are deliberately misremembered.

PeteFree.com

Misquoting Martin Luther King Jr. on His Own Memorial — Lies Have apparently become America’s Only Currency