IT IS GRATIFYING and gladdening that the Interior Department has decided to fix the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial by restoring the civil rights leader’s “drum major” quote to the full, verbatim version of what Dr. King said, rather than a misleadingly edited fragment.
Dr. King said in 1968: “Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.” But the inscription on the monument unveiled last fall read only: “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.” That wrongly made Dr. King sound, as poet Maya Angelou put it, “like an arrogant twit.”
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has handled this deftly, taking on the matter personally, avoiding institutional defensiveness and emphasizing why it matters. The memorial is, he said, a “reminder of the continuing relevance of Dr. King’s dream of dignity, respect and justice for all. With a monument so powerful and timeless, it is especially important that all aspects of its words, design and meaning stay true to Dr. King’s life and legacy.”
The decision to include the entire quote has preceded any announcement about how the correction will be etched into the granite Stone of Hope. The secretary quoted us a cost range of $150,000 to $600,000 — a cost that shouldn’t be borne by the government, since it seems to have acted in good faith, approving the original plans with the full quote. Private donations, especially from the Martin Luther King Memorial Foundation, are a much fairer source.
Not everyone is happy with the correction. Ed Jackson Jr., the project’s lead architect, told The Post’s Carol Morello that the change to make the memorial more accurately reflect Dr. King’s words will “deface” and “destroy the quality” of the monument. He laments that he had not been consulted for this decision. How ironic that last claim is: The poorly edited quote arose because Mr. Jackson unilaterally chose to edit out 37 of the 47 words from the original text without consulting the various entities authorized to approve the content of the monument.
It is vital to remember that Dr. King’s point was about the perils of “the drum-major instinct” — the desire to seem important and get attention for oneself — and that the instinct should be secondary to the change one wants to make in the world. The difference between Dr. King’s quote and Mr. Jackson’s excerpt — a warning about the desire to boast, versus an actual boast — is precisely the lesson needed here.
Luckily, we have all had a few months to ruminate on what King really said — and future memorial visitors will get the same chance.
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