by Ghost of John Brown
Arguably, there is no figure in the 20th Century that pushed the civil rights agenda more effectively than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. My first year in college was at Boston University, where Dr. King studied, and his name is significant around the campus.
Fittingly, Dr. King will be memorialized on the National Mall with a new memorial. However, that is probably the only good thing that can be said about the project. If Dr. King could see what is happening, he might lift is foot through the ground and give a good swift kick in the backside to his family.
The problems with the memorial are numerous.
First, and perhaps most depressingly, the King family has held the words and likeness of their father hostage.......for money. Reportedly, the family demanded and received $800,000 in fees from the foundation that raised the money for the memorial. Of course this is nothing new for the King children, who until recently had squabbled for years over the estate of their late father, which was worth millions.
I wonder what their father would think after he had uttered these words in the famous "I have a dream" speech:
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
His children have certainly failed if judged by their character.
If that weren't enough......When the foundation went to look for someone to build the statue, they decided to farm the work out to a Chinese artist. China!?! Really?? To honor one of the greatest champions of equality and civil rights, the foundation chose an artist from a country that has almost no earthly idea what civil rights are about. In China, people that speak out against the State are imprisoned, railroaded, their land is confiscated, they are tortured and killed. And this is the genesis of the statue that will honor a civil rights champion? Maybe if they would have used an American artist, Dr. King wouldn't look Chinese.
It's not enough that we have thousands of skilled artists that could have done an equal, if not better job on the statute. Now the foundation is bringing 8-12 Chinese masons over to help assemble the piece, which has drawn sharp rebukes by the local Brickworkers and Allied Craftworkers Union.
Memorials typically stand for centuries. Their symbolism is usually embedded with deep meaning. You can read about the symbolism in a 9/11 Memorial, or the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial. One reason that the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero has taken so long to construct is that there were painstaking discussions about the symbolism. The final height was determined to be 1,776 feet because of the symbolism of the number matching our Declaration of Independence.
With that in mind, the Statute of Martin Luther King, Jr. has inscribed on the side "Out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope." So let me get this right. Instead of obtaining the rock from a quarry in Dr. King's home state of Georgia, the "mountain of despair" that he emanates from comes from a quarry in Communist China? At least one American artist is claiming that the stone used for the memorial was cut utilizing slave labor. I'm not sure of the symbolism there.
Why don't we go ahead and rename the White House "Daminggong Palace" since we are selling everything else to the Chinese. Daminggong Palace was also known as the "Palace of Grand Brightness", which seems pretty fitting these days.
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