The allegorical assemblages of the Martin Luther King Jr. Monument.
By Kofi Boone, FASLA
Photography by Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA
I’ve been to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., many times: day and night, individually and in groups. I’ve sat and watched groups as they moved through the Mountain of Despair sculpture, touched the walls of quotes, and took selfies in front of the Stone of Hope. I have many friends and family who love the memorial. The site works as a linear narrative experience, and it does, in scale, material, and level of detail, mirror other memorials that share the National Mall. Based upon how you remember King, or how you want to remember King, the memorial can inspire or frustrate you. The King Memorial symbolizes the challenges that come from the decision to either be a part of a whole symbolic landscape fabric or to be apart from it. Should a memorial to a civil rights leader blend in with memorials to people that in some cases represent the opposite of their interests and values?
The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial opened in 2011 and almost immediately sparked controversies including site selection and the transformation of the original design into its final form. The memorial’s development was rife with the challenges of reconciling competing visions of how to honor the contributions of one of the most famous leaders of the modern civil rights movement. Now, more than a decade later, and in the midst of a disciplinary rethinking of memorialization, the King Memorial may offer insights to those facing the challenge of interpreting contested memories through public landscapes.
The site, on the northwest corner of the Tidal Basin, was not the site originally proposed. The federal government’s planning entity for the D.C. region, the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), proposed a location near Constitution Gardens and closer to the Lincoln Memorial. This was intended to leverage the popularity of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. However, NCPC’s recommendation was countered by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, an independent federal agency that advises on issues of design. Presumably the commission was concerned with the potential scale of the King Memorial and its visual impact on the experience of the Lincoln Memorial. Instead, the Commission of Fine Arts recommended the Tidal Basin site. Home to hundreds of cherry blossoms (which bloom in early spring, near the date of King’s assassination), the Tidal Basin site could borrow the broader reflective quality of the basin. It also had an implied connection to the National Mall based on a line of sight between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. But siting a memorial to a civil rights leader between someone who owned enslaved African people (Jefferson) and someone who primarily signed the Emancipation Proclamation to destabilize the Confederacy (Lincoln) was problematic. Arrington Dixon, an NCPC member at the time, said, “There are too many things here that make me feel that [the Tidal Basin site] is the back of the bus again.” However, the site was eventually accepted.
The memorial visualizes key factors we associate with Martin Luther King Jr. but also makes vague references to others. What is well-known and reflected most prominently in the aesthetic of the memorial is King’s legacy as one of America’s greatest mobilizers through public oratory. King’s excellence in deploying the Black theological tradition of allegory and metaphor as a means of clarifying social injustice informed ROMA Design Group, the competition-winning team that produced the original memorial design. The team, which eventually included the Black-led architectural firm McKissack and McKissack, derived two of its most important conceptual design cues from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech: his metaphor describing the legacy of America’s Jim Crow policies as “the mountain of despair” and the promise of a commitment to civil rights as “a stone of hope.” The two sculptures are carved from granite and form the most massive and visible elements of the memorial. The Mountain of Despair is split with an opening that visually connects the Lincoln Memorial to the Tidal Basin and the Jefferson Memorial beyond and to the procession through this memorial site. The Stone of Hope, from which a towering and scowling figure of King emerges, sits slightly off-center from the opening in the Mountain of Despair. The positioning implies that the stone was moved with effort from the mountain.
“This is our hope. This is the faith that I go
back to the South with. With this faith,
we will be able to hew out of the
mountain of despair a stone of hope.”—Martin Luther King Jr.
The memorial’s landscape plan is based on the symmetrical layout of the site plan. The diagonal line of sight connecting the memorial to the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial features a tapered broad plaza, paved in granite, which narrows to the Mountain of Despair. A retaining wall filled with layered plantings rises as you move to the threshold, the cut through the mountain. After proceeding through the narrow passage, the space opens to reveal the Stone of Hope and the expansive view of the Tidal Basin beyond. An arched perpendicular space is revealed at this point with two densely planted islands framed by curved seat walls. Masses of grasses, shrubs, and flowering trees amplify the basic structure of the overall monument. The entire memorial space is accessible, with no ramps, rails, or steps.
While King’s contributions have been well-documented, what is less celebrated is that the modern civil rights movement included the work of thousands of people—it was not the work of one man. An original feature of the design concept was the creation of garden seating areas to commemorate activists who were killed in the struggle for civil rights freedom. These gardens were to be connected by water that would have collected and poured over a wall of quotes by King, visualizing a reference to justice rolling down “like a mighty stream.”
There appear to be traces in the final landscape that are reminiscent of the allegory of rolling streams. Arching granite retaining walls that extend from the ground to seat-wall height on the north and south sides of the memorial frame the memorial’s relationship to the Tidal Basin edge. Two undulating islands between the basin edge and the wall form a variety of seating arrangements either facing the curving wall or located along narrower walkways shaded by flowering trees. Oehme, van Sweden and Associates Inc., the landscape architect of record, did extensive work with the soil to support the growth of more than 180 newly planted Yoshino cherry trees. The new planting adds to the memorial’s powerful visual and contextual connection to the Tidal Basin’s historic cherry trees.
The dark polished surfaces and sinuous forms of the wall mimic waterways. The thick and layered plantings on the memorial’s northern side emulate rolling surfaces, perhaps rolling waters or hills that form the watersheds that feed streams. The plantings’ mounded forms offer stark contrast to the straight walls leading to the Mountain of Despair. This experiential interpretation of the design is strictly conjecture on my part, and the lack of actual interpretation for visitors is disappointing.
“We will not be satisfied until
justice rolls down like waters,
and righteousness like
a mighty stream.”—Martin Luther King Jr.
The final elements of the memorial are a selection of King’s quotes presented on the Stone of Hope as well as two arching granite retaining walls. The shape of the walls responds to another allegory used by King in his “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” speech: “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The wall includes selected quotes from King’s speeches and is illuminated at night. There are small seating nooks facing the quotes integrated into the retaining walls to enable groups to sit and reflect on the words. Over multiple visits to the site, I’ve observed that people do pause and read the quotes. However, the quotes included in the memorial are decidedly less critical than King’s most famous speeches, with only a few references to his “Three Evils of Society” speech from 1967.
Two recent efforts call into question not only the future of this memorial but our attitude about the nature of the National Mall landscape as a permanent setting for holding our national public memory. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Trust for the National Mall, and the National Park Service recently held an ideas competition with invited proposals that speculate on the potential future of the Tidal Basin. One theme that was pursued in all the proposals was the impacts of climate change and the inevitable sinking of the National Mall. The National Mall, as we know it today, was built on a floodplain and is slowly being reclaimed through settling, erosion, and flooding as ecological systems add dynamics to a currently statically designed landscape.
“We shall overcome
because the arc of
the moral universe
is long, but it bends
toward justice.”—Martin Luther King Jr.
Another recent effort was the Beyond Granite pilot project sponsored by the Trust for the National Mall with support from the NCPC and the National Park Service in 2023. This effort invited artists to implement short-term monuments that challenged the typical narratives, materials, aesthetics, and visitor interactions we experience on the National Mall today. In a sense, this initiative presents the possibilities of integrating layers of cultural dynamics and change in a setting that has been intentionally designed to be perceived as intransigent. For the King Memorial, facing near-term climate-related risks, and lacking explicit connections to the modern civil rights movement, there may be opportunities to adapt and engage a broader range of public memory.
Kofi Boone, FASLA, is the Joseph D. Moore Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning and a University Faculty Scholar at North Carolina State University.
CORRECTION: A previous version of the article misidentified Monument Lab as being a partner of the Tidal Basin Ideas Lab, which was led by a partnership between the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Trust for the National Mall, and the National Park Service. In addition, the park service was inadvertently omitted as one of the partners of the Beyond Granite pilot exhibition, which took place in 2023, not 2022. The errors have been corrected.