Thanks, AZ. Of course I am more aware of the monument and the impending unveiling because I work in D.C. I emailed the following to Courtland Milloy, an African-American writer with the Washington Post, who asked for readers' reactions to the monument. He emailed back to say he agreed with me. As you will see from the following, I have written for a local Baltimore publication about monuments to prominent blacks.
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Hello Mr Milloy
I love a well designed monument and as a local historian I have written about Baltimore monuments for
The Urbanite magazine in Baltimore (
http://www.baltimoremd.com/monuments/douglass1.html and
http://www.baltimoremd.com/monuments/thurgood.html) however I find the MLK monument as designed to be disturbing and unfriendly in that it facially doesn't look enough like Dr. King and doesn't project his kinder, humanitarian side.
It is perhaps significant that the sculptor, Lei Yi Xin, is Chinese and he has made Dr. King look Chinese rather than African American. How did his design get approved? While the size of this monumental scupture is fitting to the stature of Dr. King -- and I do like the mountain concept -- the way he is modeled in that hostile stance is more fitting to a sculpture for Mao than for America's great Civil Rights leader. This is unfortunate, in my view.
Best regards
Christopher T. George
---------- Post added at 04:32 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:09 PM ----------
The memorial is costing
$120 million part of it coming from the
Hilfiger Foundation
Chris
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