Prometheus 6

Isaac Newton Farris Jr., Dr. King’s nephew and the director of the King Center in Atlanta, said he hoped the commission had a sufficient understanding of Dr. King’s mission. “They’re saying it looks too confrontational,” he said. “I’m saying, what do you think he was doing?”

But as if to illustrate the perception gap at work here, Thomas E. Luebke, the commission secretary, remarked, “I don’t know that most people would say, ‘Dr. King, he was really a confrontational guy.’ ” 

Larger Than Life, More to Fight Over
By SHAILA DEWAN

Twenty-eight feet tall and carved from Chinese granite, the statue of Martin Luther King Jr. planned for the National Mall in Washington could resist almost any attack but the one that came recently from the panel whose approval it needs to proceed.

The United States Commission of Fine Arts, which must sign off on every inch of the $100 million memorial, from typeface to tree variety to color scheme, said in a letter that “the colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed sculpture recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries.”

In a flourish that the commission secretary now says he regrets, the letter also said that the statue made Dr. King look “confrontational.”

From the Washington Monument on, no memorial has been erected on the Mall without a bruising debate. But there is something about Dr. King that makes the simple act of commemoration a thicket of controversy. [P6: Gee...I wonder what that something is...]

Even far smaller memorials to Dr. King, in far less prominent places, regularly meet with impassioned dissent. Sculptors have battled complaints about everything from their choice of pose (too arrogant) to the size of Dr. King’s feet (too big).

In Rocky Mount, N.C., where Dr. King delivered an early version of his “I Have a Dream” speech, a $56,000 bronze was so ill-received that the city council had it removed (it was based on the same photograph of Dr. King as the proposed Washington sculpture), and models by a second sculptor failed to mollify the opposition. In Buffalo, an African-American state senator plans to seek $150,000 in state money to replace an eight-foot bust that people have long complained bears little resemblance to its subject. In Charlotte, N.C., there was an unsuccessful movement to replace the head of a full-body sculpture a newspaper called “The World’s Ugliest Statue of Martin Luther King.”

Most of those complaints have come from the public, especially from the African-American community. In Rocky Mount, for example, it was a majority-white city council that commissioned the statue from a white sculptor and, after a shift in power, a majority-black council that took it down. Ed Dwight, a black sculptor who has also criticized the Mall memorial, complained, “White people don’t look at us as we look at ourselves.”

In Washington, though, it is an all-white commission objecting, and what is at stake is the official, national depiction of a man who challenged the nation’s very way of life.