Ed Dwight isn’t here in Washington for the big event.
And I always thought he would be, at the center of a celebration.
D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray and Harry Johnson, Sr., president of the MLK Memorial Foundation, discuss the decision to postpone the dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial due to the potential storms caused by Hurricane Irene.
The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
More than a decade ago, he created a stunning bronze sculpture that would be placed on the Mall, one of the last two memorials authorized before the space was to be closed to any new memorials, forever, in 2003.
His design was stamped on a commemorative coin by the U.S. Mint in 1998, General Motors gave the project $1.5 million, and the artwork was well on its way to being enlarged and erected near the Lincoln Memorial.
At the time, the other project that had been given the green light for the Mall — the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial — was in its infancy. It had no artist, no coin and not that much money.
But Dwight believed that both works would be made and that they would be like “three legs of a stool” — the African American patriots who fought for the nation, the president who freed them, then the civil rights leader who worked for their equality — that would tell the story of black Americans.
Dwight, who had made history once before as the NASA training program’s first African American astronaut, was prepared to make history again, sculpting the first memorial on the nation’s front yard in honor of black Americans.
And then, pfft. It all went kaput.
The foundation created two decades ago and supported by President Ronald Reagan to honor the heroics of about 5,000 black Americans who fought in the Revolutionary War began to bicker, then the members split, and, eventually, it all imploded.
Its founder, Maurice Barboza, went on to create his own foundation, hired his own artist and is working toward getting a similar memorial in another part of the Mall area.
“The King memorial will tell only a small part of the long saga. Without showing Americans where the dreams originated or how the churches and self-help groups formed by the Revolutionary War generation came to form the backbone of the civil rights movement, we miss the so-much-larger and inspiring story,” Barboza told me.
The time of death for the original memorial was midnight on Oct. 26, 2005, when the last application for an extension to allow construction on the Mall wasn’t filed. The president of the Black Patriots Foundation at the time, Rhonda Roberson, kept telling me she would find a way to make it work. But she didn’t file the application, and after the last chance to make the memorial tick-tocked past, the Web site for the project went dark, the phones were disconnected and Roberson stopped answering calls.
The death of this majestic memorial is “a pain in my heart” for Wayne Smith, who was on the board of the memorial foundation and was the one who got the coin minted.
He watched, aghast, as the foundation kept spiraling the costs upward, projecting fundraising goals that seemed improbable.
Smith found a way for Dwight to erect the sculpture for $1 million, even less than the huge grant from General Motors. But by then, it was too late. The foundation was cratering and the idea was batted away.
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