I hadn’t been back to the monument in the two years since I first saw it and thought, hmm. I went home, Googled the oddly pompous words flanking King to the left, and discovered they were a ham-fisted truncation of something far more nuanced and humble that King once said in a sermon. The shortening of his words was a dreadful error in judgment, a depressing reminder of how we have failed King in so many other ways, and it filled me with joy. An evil sort of joy.
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The quote had been shortened not by a historian but by an architect, as an aesthetic decision. The change was never approved by the council that had chosen the memorial’s quotes. Cutting words for space had turned a self-effacing statement by King into a strangely arrogant, somewhat baffling boast of his own importance as a “drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.” Not the kind of thing you see on memorials.
After a bureaucratic imbroglio over a sandblasting technique that slowed the process down, the monument is now back on track to be fixed by Aug. 28, the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.
People ask me what it feels like to have wrought such a change. Humbling, I say, staring off importantly into middle distance. It’s not about me, I say. It’s a testament to the power of truth, of words, and people of goodwill acting as one. It is about Maya Angelou’s indignation, and The Washington Post editorial board’s persistence, and Stephen Colbert’s acid contempt. Mostly, it’s about Martin Luther King Jr. and the debt we all owe him, and about remembering him the right way.
That’s only one way of looking at it, of course. Here’s another way, more appropriate to Washington, which is Egotown, U.S.A. In this second formulation, I went on “CBS This Morning” to talk about the memorial, and they picked me up in a cab! I am on the monument’s Wikipedia page. I am the $900,000 woman. I am an English major for justice, peace and righteousness.
Perhaps the greatest measure of my awesome powers is that people still write to me for help fixing what they don’t like about memorials. That King looks Chinese, or left-handed, or that Eisenhower shouldn’t look like a farm boy, and that FDR specifically asked for a monument no bigger than his desk, so why did we allot him acres? Surely I can get something done, the e-mails implore.
This is also a grave responsibility. And it brings with it some power. And if you don’t use power, you lose it. Which is why I’ve been walking around federal Washington of late hoping to find something in other monuments in need of a fix. Below, some suggested revisions.
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