WASHINGTON (AP) - A year after the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial opened to visitors on the National Mall, the group behind the monument is still working with the National Park Service to change an inscription quoting the civil rights leader and is planning to bring new programs to the site.
Critics, including the poet Maya Angelou, complained last year the inscription didn't accurately reflect King's words from a 1968 sermon about how he would like to be remembered. It reads: "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness."
The phrase is inscribed without quotation marks because it is paraphrased. But the full quotation seems more modest. The U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the park service, ordered in February that the memorial should display the full quote.
The full quotation reads: "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." It will be slightly smaller than the current inscription.
Harry Johnson, president of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Foundation, told the Associated Press on Tuesday the work to change the inscription will wait until after the height of the summer tourist season. Then the $120 million memorial's original sculptor and stone carver will return in September or October to change the words carved in the central "Stone of Hope."
"We're trying for the least amount of disruption so that no harm is done to the stone," Johnson said of the upcoming stone work. Previously, the memorial group fought the change saying an alteration would harm the design and cause a mismatch in the memorial's granite color.
Now plans call for Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin to chip away stone from the current inscription, add new granite and then smooth the lines of the stone to help hide the patch work. Then third-generation stone carver Nicholas Benson of Newport, R.I., will add the full quotation to the memorial.