Kingdom Come

In 1984, five members of the college fraternity Alpha phi Alpha put forward the idea of building a fitting monument in the nation’s capital to one of their departed brothers: Martin Luther King Jr. Twenty-seven years and $120 million later, they have one.

We all do. Though it lacks both the radical imagination and the profound simplicity of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the new Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial is the most effective monument to appear in Washington since Lin’s brilliant reinvention of the form in 1982. As a work of art, the stiffly modeled sculpture of King at its center has its problems. But as a work of visual rhetoric, a device for summoning feelings about one of the greatest Americans, the first monument on the National Mall devoted to a man who was never President–and the first for an African American–gets a lot of things right.

The ROMA Design Group in San Francisco won the commission for the 4-acre memorial 11 years ago with a concept based on a line from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech: “With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” ROMA divided the Mountain of Despair into two 30-ft.-high masses of carved granite that face one another across a divide. Walk between them and you emerge onto a plaza along the edge of the Tidal Basin. There you find the Stone of Hope, which appears to have shot forward from the center of the Mountain to present a 30-ft. figure of King emerging from the rough granite. Behind it is a 450-ft.-long wall inscribed with quotations from King. And all around are 182 cherry trees that will burst into bloom every April, the month King was assassinated–a symbolic rebirth.

Though the King memorial rests upon a literal-minded embodiment of a quotation, it succeeds in calling up feelings of anguish and elation, doubt and fulfillment, in a setting where visitors can sit and reflect on King’s life. It’s fair to say the pale pink granite, chosen in part to ensure that carved details would be visible at night, undermines the intended gravitas of the Mountain of Despair (to say nothing of making King appear white). But a gamble that did pay off was allowing visitors to approach the memorial plaza from behind, through the gap down the center of the Mountain, which frames an elemental view of stone, sky and water. Anyone arriving on the plaza via that passageway–there are three other entry points–will experience a sensation of compression and release, a physical and psychological correlative for the struggles and triumphs of King’s career.

And the statue? It came as a surprise when the foundation that raised funds for the memorial chose a sculptor based in China. Lei Yixin’s résumé included monumental figures of Mao, and in 2008 the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, which reviews plans for Washington monuments, criticized an initial version of his King statue for its “colossal scale and Social Realist style.” Lei made changes, but even now the stonework, which is not exactly supple, bears a whiff of officialdom. Lei’s nationality may also help explain why the Mountain resembles the soft-shouldered slopes in Chinese scroll paintings.

But in truth, any large statue was going to cause hand-wringing, because democracies are never entirely comfortable with monumental sculpture. We like to think of ourselves as ordinary folk, even when we produce people as extraordinary as King. Though at the commission’s request Lei also softened King’s features to make him appear less confrontational, he still confronts us–which seems just right. In life he was a man of peace. In death he forces us to remember that the struggle for justice he devoted himself to is in our hands now.