I thought I had an easy fix to a National Park Service conundrum. At issue is the newly unveiled Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington and a quote etched on the Stone of Hope: “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”
But that is not what King actually said.
The origin of the quote is a speech King delivered at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1968, two months before he was assassinated. King’s remarks were really about the inner drum major in all of us. “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.”
Supposedly, for space considerations, those words became “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness” on the new monument.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has announced there will be a fix. The question is, how? Will the portion of stone bearing the quote be replaced with something that (hopefully) matches and is a more accurate representation of what King said, or is it possible to reduce the surface and re-carve?
To me it’s a no-brainer. Simply take off the quotation marks and replace I with “He,” so the side of the monument would read: He was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness. That would seem to defuse the argument that the truncated quote takes King out of context and sounds self-serving. In its place would be a flattering statement about King based on his own words.
Carol Bradley Johnson, a spokeswoman for the National Park Service, said I was not the first to propose this solution. “Although your idea of changing the ‘I’ to ‘He’ was considered, ultimately a decision was made not to go that way because it would not be Dr. King’s words, which the family thought was very important,” she told me in an e-mail. “And changing one word would be more obvious than cutting the stone along the joint lines and re-engraving.”
In the end, as Salazar announced, the misquote would be replaced with the exact quote.
It’s a logical, though seemingly more expensive, solution. Somebody is now on the hook for replacing the stones bearing the paraphrased quote. The Park Service hopes philanthropic support will enable the completion of the work in time for the celebration of King’s birthday in January 2013.
I’d have preferred my solution. A guy can dream, right?
