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Build The Dream The Martin Luther King Jr., National Memorial begins construction

The King Family surrounded by Jessie Jackson, Andrew Young, President(s) Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were among thousands who took part in the ground breaking ceremony on November 13th 2006. The 100 million dollar project was funded by a variety of sources including an appropriation from the U.S. Congress, Toyota, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity and numerous companies and individuals.

Immediately after his assassination in 1968, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity championed the effort for A Dr. Martin Luther King Memorial on Washington D.C.’s Mall.

In 2005, Congress authorized the United States Treasury to match 10 million dollars in private contributions. The Walt Disney Company 2006 donation of $2.5 million raised the foundation’s total to $47 million and triggered the $10 million matching grant from Congress. Donations of $1 million from PepsiCo, State Farm Insurance, FedEx and General Electric increased the fundraising total to $61 million of the needed $100 million.

The King Memorial will be located on a four-acre site on the National Mall that borders the Tidal Basin. It will be adjacent to the Roosevelt Memorial and will create a visual “line of leadership” from the Lincoln Memorial, where King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, to the Jefferson Memorial.

The centerpiece of the design features a figure of King emerging from a rough-hewn boulder in a landscape of large stones, flowing water and cherry trees. Organizers have set a goal of dedicating the Memorial in 2008.
“This project has been over a decade in the making,” Bush noted. And he said he wanted to “particularly thank” Clinton, who signed the legislation authorizing the monument.

“As we break ground, we give Martin Luther King his rightful place among the many Americans honored on the National Mall,” President Bush said. “It will unite the men who declared the promise of America and defended the promise of America with the man who redeemed the promise of America.”
The memorial, to be built roughly a half-mile from the Lincoln Memorial, where King gave his historic speech, will be the first to honor an African American civilian on the Mall.

“When Martin Luther King came to Washington in December of 1963,” Bush said, “he came to hold this nation to its own standards. … He stood not far from here … with thousands gathered around him. His dream spread a message of hope.”

About the Memorial
The approved site creates a visual “line of leadership” from the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, to the Jefferson Memorial.

The Stone of Hope
The memorial will contain 24 niches (semicircular nave-like shapes) along the upper walkway to commemorate the contribution of the many individuals that gave their lives in different ways to the civil rights movement – from Medgar Evers to the four children murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham.
A number of the niches will be left open and incomplete, allowing additional niches to be dedicated as new events unfold in the dynamic civil rights movement.

Landscape Elements
Natural elements – water, stone, trees – are used to underscore the themes of justice, democracy and hope. These are not composed to impose a didactic message, but overlap with one another, adding layers of content that can be discovered by the visitor.

Water
Water is used throughout the memorial to recall most powerfully the theme of justice. Drawing on its location at the edge of the Tidal Basin, water is used as an essential element that builds on King’s words and on the crescendo effect of his sermons and speeches.

The water appears throughout the memorial, but in each location, a special character is created. Within the site, the source of the water comes from the multiple martyrs’ wellsprings, residing in individually crafted niches at the top of the landscape berm and adjacent to the path. Each of these niches and wellsprings will recount the contribution of each martyr to the movement and each will be unique to commemorate the individual. Wellsprings will be hewn out of the stone (“rough on the outside, smooth on the inside”) and will create a contemplative environment for reflection.

From these quiet niches adjacent to the elevated walkway, individual streams will flow out over the wall and form a part of the larger torrent cascading down a water wall. This wall, in turn, will be punctuated by turbulent water tumbling over textured surfaces and will contrast the large smooth surfaces of polished granite, glistening with text, chronologically arranged to recount the major freedom struggles of King’s life.

Stone
Hewn stones with smooth surfaces (“every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain”) are used throughout the memorial to display the different ways King and other civil rights activists acted out their faith that the democratic ideals of the founding fathers (symbolized by the Jefferson Memorial) can be realized through struggle and sacrifice.
At the entry portal, two stones are parted and a single stone is pushed back in the horizon, appearing as the missing piece of what was once a single boulder. The smooth and polished sides of each portal stone contrast the rough surfaces of the boulder. On the one side, the theme of hope is presented, with the text from King’s 1963 speech cut sharply into the stone: “With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” On the other side are inscribed these words: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Together, and at the threshold of the Memorial plaza, the themes of justice and hope are introduced and are juxtaposed with democratic ideals, forcefully brought into visual focus by the presence of the Jefferson Monument in the distance, across the Tidal Basin.
Beyond this portal, a single stone appears to have been thrust forward, wrested from the boulder and pushed forward, within the frame of view of the Jefferson Memorial. On it, King’s words are inscribed: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’…We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.”

Trees
Large, majestic trees – oaks, pines, magnolias and cherries – reinforce the spatial integrity of the Memorial and add a temporal dimension, exhibiting seasonal change and annual growth and offering opportunities for additional memorial spaces dedicated to other heroes, such as Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer, of the struggle for social justice and nonviolent social change. For most of the site, the trees are planted in random masses, weaving together the cherries at the edges of the Tidal Basin with the magnolias framing either side of the plaza space or creating evergreen sentinels, marking the edges of the flanking streets. At the top of the inclined plane, adjacent to the upper pathway, a regular cadence of American oaks traces the curvature of form that embraces the site and brings into focus the central themes of democracy, justice and hope.

Source: The Washington D. C. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation, Inc.

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