“This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning.” Ground is broken on the new MLK memorial, to be “built along the edge of the Tidal Basin, midway between monuments to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. It will be the first on the Mall honoring an African American and the first that does not memorialize a president or a war hero.” Great! As I’ve said before in this space, I’m all in favor of adding more historically-themed monuments to the Mall, and a tribute to Dr. King seems a particularly worthy addition to our nation’s central gathering place.
Tag: The Mall
Been in the Storm So Long.
In related news, a site is chosen for the National Museum of African American History and Culture (at 14th and Constitution NW, near the Washington Monument.) As I argued before, some museum along such lines on our nation’s Mall is long overdue.
Buried, but not Dead.
New York prepares for a mass re-burial of over 400 Colonial-era slaves in the spot where they were found 12 years ago. Perhaps this ceremony will help to encourage more formal and historic recognition of the city’s relationship to slavery. (As the article notes, Gotham once held more slaves than any other city but Charleston.) And as New York, so too the nation — While the Holocaust Museum serves as an important and necessary reminder of how nations ostensibly grounded in Enlightenment ideals can go terribly, terribly wrong, it’s a bit glaring that we have such a fine museum in Washington dedicated to Germany’s most grievous sin, without any comparable historic institution focusing on our own. A National Museum of Slavery is well past due, and, Civil War importance aside, it should really be on the National Mall, not in Fredericksburg.