Hurricane Irene forces cancellation of Martin Luther King statue ceremony Skip to main content

Hurricane Irene forces cancellation of Martin Luther King statue ceremony

The approach of Hurricane Irene has forced the cancellation of the dedication for a controversial memorial in Washington DC to Martin Luther King Jr.

The $120m (£74m) memorial, the first to honour an African-American on the national Mall, has been in the pipeline for 25 years and up to 300,000 people were expected at Sunday's ceremony.

But Harry Johnson, chief executive of the King memorial foundation, said safety had to come first. "I'm really disappointed and hurt," Johnson told the Washington Post. "But the memorial is going to be there for ever."

The postponement is the latest in a series of setbacks for the memorial. Some have criticised the foundation for failing to hire an African-American sculptor – or even an American – to create the memorial. The 30ft image of King was created by Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin at a workshop in China.

Others have suggested the statue makes King look white, or even Chinese, because it is carved out of pale granite. Courtland Milloy, a columnist for the Washington Post, went so far as to complain that the sculptor had given King a "steely squint" and dressed him in a suit that Stalin might have worn.

There really is something peculiar about having an artist from communist China sculpt the Martin Luther King Jr memorial statue," Milloy wrote. "Surely having a black sculptor of a black civil rights icon – working on ground once toiled by black slaves, on the national Mall, designed and surveyed with the help of a black mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker – would have added to the King memorial's symbolic power."

Sunday's dedication – which was to have beeen attended by Barack Obama – was the crowning event in a week of celebrations.

"It is still a success because we have a memorial," Johnson said. "We have worked so many years for this memorial and that is a success in itself.

"To say that Dr King is now on the Mall between the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, you can't ask for anything better than that. We just didn't have a dedication; hopefully everyone will understand."

The ceremony will now take place in September or October.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/26/hurricane-irene-martin-luther-king-statue
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