Just came back from a bicycle ride around the MLK Memorial site, to see what's up. The Martin Luther King Memorial officially opens on August 28, after the dedication, but visitors will be permitted, starting August 22. The Memorial is by the Tidal Basin, next to the FDR Memorial... My next door neighbor observed that the Mall is getting mighty crowded. Hope this is the last memorial built on the Mall. It looks like everything is almost in place for the week of MLK Memorial Dedication celebrations...Sculpture in place, around 150 fledgling cherry trees planted...We need rain, in this blistering hot, dry summer, to get everything to look nice, for the dedication.
For a list of activities, including a free concert on the Mall, Sunday, August 28, at 4 p.m., during the MLK Memorial Dedication Week, go to www.mlkmemorial.org
The MLK Memorial Dedication ceremony takes place on Sunday, August 28, the 48th anniversary of MLK's "I have a dream" speech, at Lincoln Memorial... Don't know about you, John, but 48 Augusts ago, when I was a kid in Indiana, I was mostly unaware of the civil rights struggles. I wish I could recall seeing the MLK speech on TV. Even though we lived just east of Chicago (before where we lived became an attractive Chicago bedroom community, with good housing prices), and not far from Gary, Indiana, with the ghettos and poverty, I think that my friends and I were mostly unaware. In my family, diversity was dating someone outside your religion.The summer of MLK, and the busing, and his "I have a Dream," I was busy worrying about not being pretty enough, dreading facing hard courses in school, dealing with an unrequited crush, hating my babysitting job. I don't think that many of us, in our corner of northwest Indiana, thought much about the civil rights movement, the MLK struggles, human rights.
Were you aware of MLK's 'I have a dream' speech in 1963? Your thoughts?
Annie River, August 1
Hey Annie,
You certainly didn't read "Come on Fluffy, This Ain't No Ballet" very carefully. What I wrote about MLK, in my book...But, my dear, where were you?
"The years 1963 and 1964 were years when we were all becoming more and more aware of social conflicts within our nation. There was much television and radio coverage about the difficult road to racial equality, a road to be traveled, re-paved, and viewed forever in our collective consciousness, despite the ignorant savagery of whites in places like Little Rock, Arkansas, despite murders, lynchings, church burnings, and myriad other crimes committed even in God’s name. Human reason and sympathy would eventually begin to prevail through the exposure of attitudes, beliefs, and traditions still accepted, even lauded, though they went back to their sources in the days of slavery. I remember visiting my grandparents one afternoon, while on TV was a newscast with a large group of mostly black folks singing, “We Shall Overcome.” My grandmother, the kindest and most loving of all people I knew, peered over her eyeglasses at the screen as she asked simply, “Overcome what?” She hadn’t asked the question from a sense of outrage, sarcasm, or any ill-feeling, so I understood in that moment what sheltered lives my grandparents had lived and that they knew nothing of the struggles in which so many were still engaged, having to fight for even simple rights the rest of us took for granted. It was very clear that our country, for all its bravado about “the land of the free,” had a long way to go. I kept going back to George Orwell’s idea that “Some animals are more equal than others.”
John's response, August 7:
