Few have worked so hard and sacrificed so much for social consciousness as Martin Luther King Jr. We’ve given him a holiday, many cities have streets named after him, and Memphis has a Civil Rights museum honoring him on the site where he was assassinated. Finally, King became the first individual who wasn’t a president to receive a monument on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
The $120 million dollar monument set on 4 acres near the Tidal Basin officially opens tomorrow and will be dedicated on August 28th. The opening comes on the 48th anniversary of King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech. It is expected that as many as 400,000 will come for the dedication, about twice as many as showed up for the original speech.
This is not something that came about suddenly. A monument to Dr. King has been in the works for over 20 years. But, there has been controversy over whether to add any more monuments to what’s sometimes known as “America’s Front Yard.
Some are afraid the area, designed in 1791 by Pierre L’Enfant, will be overdeveloped with too many monuments. The Martin Luther King Jr. monument brings the total count to nine major monuments. That may not seem like many, but almost half were built in the last 16 years. The Washington Monument was dedicated in 1885, the Lincoln Memorial in 1992, the War Memorial in 1931 and the Jefferson Memorial in 1943. The mall remained steadfast for almost another 40 years until the Vietnam Memorial was built in 1982. After that, Congress voted to add the Korean War Memorial in 1995, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in 1997 and the World War II Memorial in 2004.
The King Memorial was featured today on CBS Sunday Morning and it looked incredible. Visitors enter through what looks like a split mountain called the Mountain of Despair. The plaza has a 30 foot granite sculpture of King. Appropriately enough, the memorial’s address is 1964 Independence Avenue, symbolic of the year the Civil Rights Act was passed.
Have you been to the National Mall? Do you think it can potentially be overcrowded with monuments? I have visited several times and it seems like there is still plenty of open space.