US honours King with memorial

Reuters/Washington

At 30-ft-tall, the sculpture at the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial is opened to the public for the first time on the National Mall yesterday in Washington, DC

Martin Luther King Jr stood 30ft tall on the National Mall as a memorial to him was unveiled yesterday morning -- the first memorial on the Mall not dedicated to a war, president or white man.Fifteen years after a Congressional Joint Resolution in 1996 to establish a memorial in Washington, DC to honour King, the four-acre site on the Tidal Basin between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials opened to the public for the first time.“From a geometrical standpoint it’s on a direct line between the Lincoln Memorial and Jefferson Memorial,” said Bill Line, spokesman for the National Park Service. “The brains and essence of our country (Thomas Jefferson), and Abe Lincoln, the greater uniter.”Visitors will walk through two massive white granite halves of the “Mountain of Despair” to reach the “Stone of Hope,” from which the sculpture of King emerges.The winning design from an international contest was inspired by the line from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, “Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.”Behind King’s sculpture, on either side of the mountain, is a 450-ft-long wall inscribed with 14 quotations from the famous orator’s speeches, sermons, and writings.King faces Jefferson wearing clothes that fade into the granite above his feet. His arms are folded, with one hand holding his rolled-up Dream speech, according to sculptor Master Lei Yixin, who is a Chinese citizen.“Dr. King’s vision is still living, in our minds; we still miss him, we still need him,” said Yixin through a translator, calling the sculpture the most important of his life, technically and emotionally. “I am trying to present Dr. King as ready to step out ... this is King’s spirit, to judge people from their character, not race, color or background.”Yixin and a team carved and assembled the stone and mountain from 159 blocks of Atlantic Green granite and Kenoran Sage granite from North America, as well as granite from Asia.The memorial will be presented to President Barack Obama and dedicated in a celebration on August 28, marking the anniversary of the Dream speech delivered from the steps of the nearby Lincoln Memorial 48 years ago.King, the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize and the leader of the American Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, led a peaceful march on Washington in 1963. A crowd of 250,000 heard his DREAM speech at the march, five years before his assassination in Memphis in 1968.