November 14, 2006 @ 5:37 pm

Celebrities Commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. At National Memorial

by: Alexis Jeffries

The $100 million project is the first-ever national monument dedicated to an African American on the National Mall. A multitude of celebrities showed up to turn the first shovels of dirt on the monument honoring King, who was murdered 38 years ago. left "This is very exciting," Harry E. Johnson, president of the Martin Luther King National Memorial, told BlackAmericaWeb.com. "This is now a reality." Among the celebrities and national dignitaries were figureheads Oprah Winfrey and Maya Angelou. After 10 long years in the making, the efforts to build the memorial accelerated after last year’s passing of fellow civil rights figure Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, widow of the late Martin Luther King Jr. “She never was a person to say ’Why didn’t it happen sooner?’ That would not be Coretta Scott King,” Angelou said of her longtime friend. The location of the memorial is surrounded by the Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt memorials near the eastern edge of the Potomac River Tidal Basin. From a distance, visitors can see the stairs where King delivered his most famous speech during the march on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. The entrance to the memorial will include a central sculpture called “The Mountain of Despair,” signifying the racially-compromised climate of America that inspired King and others to overcome racial and social barriers without violence. “This gateway was designed to lead visitors to the heart and soul of this living memorial,” said Ed Jackson, Jr., the project’s executive architect. Donations from major corporations totaled less than $40 million as of August 2005. But as of Nov. 1, donations topped $65.5 million, and the Martin Luther King Memorial Project Foundation says they hope to have the site completed by the spring of 2008.

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Article tags: Martin Luther King, Oprah 

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