I was just reading your newspaper’s account of the rejection of Robert Katz’s team’s design for the King memorial: “It’s not a memorial to Dr. King,” Marcia Minter, a local artist and consultant to the committee, said in deliberations afterward. “Now it’s about everybody who was involved in the civil rights movement and what it stands for.”
This is the same sort of thinking that Maya Lin encountered against her Vietnam Memorial proposal. “The Wall” was exactly about “everybody who was involved,” and that’s why it is so powerfully moving. As a Vietnam war veteran I have visited the Wall a number of times and it always buckles my knees. And. I was disheartened when people like Minter demanded, and got, a traditional statue erected nearby, competing with and ultimately detracting from the simple power of the Wall.
Ms. Minter probably would have been pleased if the designers had replicated the King statue in D.C.
Nick Mills
Rockland
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