In King's Honor, A Dream Achieved

"Our father just wanted to be a great pastor," said Bernice King, his youngest child. "Little did he know, he became a great pastor to a nation."

The memorial is scheduled to open in 2008, though fundraising is still underway and the day's ceremonies did not mark an official beginning of construction. Organizers have raised about two-thirds of the $100 million needed to develop the four-acre site, which will include a sculpted likeness of King and references to many of his most memorable speeches, including the famous "I Have a Dream" oratory on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Some in the audience remembered the sweltering August day in 1963 when King made that speech a half-mile away. The young men who marched with King are now well into their 60s and 70s. Organizers have been pushing for a monument for more than 20 years and want participants in the movement to witness its completion, said Harry E. Johnson Sr., president of the Washington, D.C. Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation.

That opportunity slipped away for King's widow, Coretta Scott King, who died in January.

Lawrence Guyot is a 67-year-old District resident who worked with King in Mississippi. He said that anyone who lived through the mayhem and strife of the 1960s and said that they had envisioned such a memorial back then was "telling a lie."

Perhaps little Dontae Ryan II, 3, will tell others someday that he, too, witnessed history. Dontae watched cartoons on a portable DVD player as his father, Dontae Ryan I, listened to three of King's children speak yesterday. Ryan attended along with hundreds of other members of Alpha Phi Alpha, the fraternity that King belonged to and that has shepherded the effort for a memorial for two decades.

"He might not remember that he was here," Ryan said of his son. "But I can show him the pictures. I think it was necessary to be here, as an Alpha and as a black man."

Beritu Haile-Selassie, 54, came to the Mall and stood outside the security gates holding a handmade poster to King that read "You dared to dream! Thank you!"

And that message -- to dream -- endures. Civil rights stalwarts Andrew Young and Jesse L. Jackson teared up recalling the man they had walked alongside to help tear down the walls of segregation. As the shovels dug into the ground, Young turned to audience members and urged them: "Keep turning the dirt. Keep turning the dirt."