01/17/2025
`Wishing you a meaningful Martin Luther King Jr. Day as we honor his legacy of equality and justice for all. May your MLK Day be filled with inspiration and a renewed commitment to promoting equality and justice.''❤️
I wanted to share these pictures I took at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on one of our Gunther Tours in 2023. It was truly breathtaking I was in awe of seeing his words etched in beautiful stone all around me I was encased by words of love and it was a such a beautiful experience.
Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial, monument honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., who led the civil rights movement in the United States from the mid-1950s. The monument is located along the west bank of the Tidal Basin, near the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial and not far from the Lincoln Memorial, from which King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington in August 1963.
The words “Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope,” taken from the “Dream” speech, are inscribed on one side of the stone. The words “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness,” were originally inscribed on the other side. However, in response to protest over what some saw as a sense of self-aggrandizement conveyed by this paraphrase of a statement King once made about himself, it was decided in 2012 to change the inscription to more accurately represent King’s full statement: “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.” Emerging from the front of the stone, facing the Jefferson Memorial across the basin, is a 30-foot (9-metre) likeness of King by Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin. Arcing from the portal around the memorial’s plaza is a 450-foot (137-metre) crescent-shaped wall on which are emblazoned 14 quotations from King on the themes of justice, democracy, love, and hope. Cherry trees and crape myrtle bushes add to the design, which was implemented by the project’s executive architect, Ed Jackson, Jr.
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