A Monument for Our Times

September 6, 2011 by Patricia Spears...

A monument for these times?

It's Labor Day in New York City. At some other time, it would bring up thoughts of pick up softball or basketball games in local parks and playgrounds; family barbecues; the parade in Union Square; the end of summer. But we are a nation beset with unemployment, underemployment, the dying throes of a middle class, once the envy of the world, but an art world glorying in financial excess. A perfect moment to contemplate the Martin Luther King Memorial Monument on the Mall. I've not seen the actual statute, but the pictures leave me tempering my sarcasm. It did not help to hear the conversation on NPR with the lead architect defending the paraphrasing a quote from one of King's most famous and complex speeches in the name of good design.

When I think of artists who could have or maybe should have created a monument to a man who did not want any monuments, I think of Martin Puryear. His abstractions in steel, bronze or wood make me think of thinking-the way wood turns in unexpected ways or opens up leaves me considering difference, energy, possibilities.

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/28

The monument in Washington, DC is of course symbolic not of King but of a certain kind of Black pride. I am reminded that the push for this started not with church goers or former SNCC operatives, but with King's fraternity brothers. Of course, King was from a very prominent middle-class family--thus, he would be a member of a major fraternity. And these men are well-connected, financially saavy and yes prideful in ways that only those who grew up and out of the last vestiges of Jim Crow and legalized segregation can be prideful. And given that these are men who have carried forth their families' ambitions and added to their own, no small monument would do--there are memorials and then there are monuments.

And they raised money, but a monument costs a great deal of money especially when it is of a still controversial American figure, many continue to see as other than Christian, American, worth celebrating (a lot like how they view our current President). And so, a considerable amount of funds for the monument comes from corporations. Well, many Black folks work in/for corporations, own stock in corporations and buy their products and services. What can you do? Sports stadiums, park benches, little league teams, monuments are all branded, one way or the other. Connecting corporations to a man who could now be seen as "post-racial" plays well in the world. All the corporations did was build on the dreams and contributions of ordinary people. Mostly, I would guess, Black people.

But it seems the corporatization of culture (which is every where right now-in higher education, medicine and social services) in our nation rarely allows for the provocative or the complex. So many aspects of the development of this monument (artist selected, marble color, font) seemed to follow the desire for a consensus of what could be his least complex and controversial--not all, but most of King's ideas and speeches. So the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., a man of warm brown color is now rendered in a color that accepts that full assimilation in America one must be white or near white even in marble. Could they have found a reddish marble-he was from Georgia, home of red clay. Black is the only color that absorbs all others in the spectrum, but clearly the symbolism is all on the "light" side. And the figure looks more like a kindly professor blown up than a man who wore comfortable, but hardly fashionable clergy suits and/or Southern men's work clothes. The lighter man in the professorial suit marching out of a block of granite--the emasculation of King's figure may not have been the intention, but . . .

Here was a man of great physical courage, intellectual rigor, spiritual expansiveness.

Here was a man who was OUTRAGED by America's continued foul treatment of Black people. And poor people. Who demanded change and did not apologize for doing so. He used the tactic of "nonviolent resistance" out of deep philosophical and political reasoning, not because he couldn't smash somebody up against their head. He may have been foolish (too many women, little too much liquor) but he was not a FOOL. If you ever get the chance, read all three of Taylor Branch's books on King and the Civil Rights Movement. You will never think about the "I have a dream" phrase or a lot of other easy on the ear stuff. You will think about a man who could have had a very comfortable life; who could have stayed with his wife and children; who could have probably got that gig at Boston University or somewhere else and become a professor, but who got up every morning facing death's waiting arms because he was a fighter for justice, equality and full citizenship. He looked deep into the American psyche and demanded JUSTICE. He died while trying to help Sanitation workers.

A monument serves many purposes and can come in many forms. King's will tell an almost true story--that one man's words and deeds can make a difference. That a man of peace (even one assassinated) can rise up and demand justice. That King is not a President or Soldier is one of the best things about the Monument's place on the Mall. He gets to represent all the people who also could be there: Rachel Carson or Joe Hill or Cesar Chavez or Mother Jones or Jonas Salk or Mark Twain--people whose ideas and deeds re-shaped, opened up, and changed our nation. This is one aspect of American culture that continues to resonate--that anyone can actually make things happen no matter where their lives start. But it is a story that is more and more difficult to tell. King's monument is the last to go up on the Mall. So his place; this design; the corrupted words will be here for years and years to come. Who knows which part of the story, future generations will repeat. Too much has been made of his dreaming. I hope future visitors find a way to see the fighter in the preacher. And the marble deepen in color towards that full spectrum he so eloquently called for.