PEP, January 2007: Dr. King is honored among presidents

By DIANE S. WILLIAMS

More than 43 years after slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” oration, prominent leaders and thousands of spectators joined King’s children Nov. 13 for a historic ground-breaking ceremony at the King Memorial site on the Washington Mall.

“Turn the dirt, turn the dirt,” said an emotional Andrew Young, former U.N. ambassador and a longtime collaborator and friend of Dr. King’s. At his side were U.S. Rep. John Lewis, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, poet Maya Angelou, the Rev. Al Sharpton and others, who reflected on their decades-long journey in the march for human dignity, freedom and equality for black Americans.

The King Memorial, a $100 million project that has received large corporate contributions, is the first on the National Mall to honor an African American. The memorial, scheduled for completion in 2008, will rest between monuments to Presidents Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder and contributor to the Declaration of Independence, and Abraham Lincoln, whose Emancipation Proclamation ended chattel slavery in 1863.

King embodied a civil rights movement that gained momentum after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision against school segregation and the 1955 Mississippi lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till. Organized through churches and colleges and shaped in part by the labor movement, the protests King led challenged America’s legal Jim Crow system of racial segregation and the widespread unemployment and disenfranchisement of blacks.

The recalcitrant white South responded with violence and bombings to Rosa Parks’ refusal to move from her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus, and the year-long boycott that followed; the Freedom Riders; the student sit-ins and marches; and the Sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, Tenn., where Dr. King was murdered as he answered AFSCME’s call to lead rallies and demonstrations.

Influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, who led India’s liberation from the stifling grip of the British Empire, King employed nonviolent resistance to break the last legal vestiges of apartheid in America.

King led the peaceful 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that brought more than 250,000 people, a fifth of them white, to the Lincoln Memorial. Refusing to believe that America could not live up to its ideals of justice and opportunity for all its citizens, King shone a bright light on America’s hypocrisy and ushered in massive change.

Assassinated at 39, Dr. King did not live to experience equality and opportunity. For freedom and democracy, peace and economic justice, Dr. King dared to dream big — not just for his own people but also for Americans of all races, colors and backgrounds. The long-hoped for King Memorial will be a monument to his selfless ideals.