Memorial Planners Have a Dream, Too

Mall Site Honoring King Reaches Next Milestone

The design of the memorial honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has won accolades, but fundraising has been beset by delays. (Kevin Wolf - AP)

Ground will be broken in many ways tomorrow morning with a ceremony heralding construction of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the Mall.

The memorial, scheduled to be completed in 2008, will mark a change in the very character of some of America's most hallowed real estate.

The Mall is lined with memorials to wars and the soldiers who died in them and marble monuments to great presidents. But this addition to Washington's monumental core will be a unique paean to the man and the ideal that it honors -- a civilian and an African American who embodied the American tradition of peaceful protest and activism.

"I think, like many kids, I came to D.C. years ago and saw all the monuments," said Harry E. Johnson Sr., president of the Washington, D.C. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation Inc. "But there never was a memorial to a man of color, a man of peace.

"And even today, there is nothing to place King in the proper historical context. He is among the giants of our country, though he was not a war hero nor a president," Johnson added.

Tomorrow's groundbreaking ceremony is expected to draw 5,000 people. It will feature former president Bill Clinton, who signed the 1996 bill authorizing the memorial. Talk show host Oprah Winfrey and poet Maya Angelou also will speak.

They will gather at the sweeping four-acre site along the Tidal Basin that sits halfway between monuments to Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, and Lincoln, liberator of slaves. The crescent-shaped memorial park will be near the steps leading to the Lincoln Memorial, where King gave his electrifying "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963.

Cranes and backhoes won't move in immediately, however. This groundbreaking is ceremonial, and the construction permits from either the secretary of the Interior or the General Services Administration will be issued once fundraising is complete. In the case of the World War II Memorial, permits were issued two months after the groundbreaking ceremony attended by about 10,000 people on Veterans Day 2000.

The design of the memorial park is the physical articulation of one of the most famous and powerful passages in King's 1963 Washington speech.

After outlining the dream of his children growing up to live in a nation where people are judged by the content of their character, where even in the racist South black and white children would join hands as sisters and brothers, he added:

"This hope is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. And with this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day."

At the memorial to King's vision, visitors will enter through a 12-foot-wide cut in the wall, walking through a tall, dark passage symbolizing the Mountain of Despair.