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This article examines the politics of memory stemming from the development and reception of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial and Stone of Hope statue of King that now resides on the National Mall in Washington D.C. The article discusses two general contrasting views expressed in the contest over how the American nation should remember King. The predominant viewpoint, which constructs King as a haloed, consensual figure, is deployed to endorse the idea that the United States is now in a post-racial era in which neoliberal governing priorities reign supreme. The contrasting viewpoint argues for portraying King as a confrontational and radical figure, who would reject the notion that the United States has achieved "his dream."
INTRODUCTION
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, no single figure consumes as much commemorative attention in the United States as does Martin Luther King Jr. This is reflected in the thousands of schools across the country that honor MLK Day each year, in the streets bearing his name that span across the nation's landscape,1 and in the 2011 unveiling of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial (MLK Memorial) on the National Mall in Washington D.C. But what King's legacy means in our time is open to debate. This essay analyzes this debate as it emerged during the development and reception of the MLK Memorial and the thirty-foot statue of King that is the memorial's centerpiece.
As David Blight observed with regard to Frederick Douglass's effort to shape the nation's memory of the U.S. Civil War: "Historical memory, he had come to realize, was not merely an entity altered by the passage of time; it was the prize in a struggle between rival versions of the past, a question of will, of power, of persuasion."2 The past does not speak for itself, but rather actors, institutions and discourses speak for and shape the meaning of the past through the construction of histories and memories. There are serious stakes here, because the relationship of a people to its past is critical to defining the political imperatives of the present and the future. Frederick Douglass knew this about the U.S. Civil War. In a similar regard, the memory of Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy and political identity...