Rights Fight Memories Stirred by Monument : Equality: The memorial in Montgomery, Ala., pays tribute to those who died in the struggle. A former Ku Klux Klan leader protests its upcoming dedication.

Raymond Payne, a 36-year-old hotel employee, recalls marching from Selma to Montgomery back in 1965, a black child marching for civil rights.

“I still remember when certain restaurants wouldn’t feed a black person,” said Payne, “and when police beat and hosed black people. That’s something that shouldn’t be shut out of people’s minds.”

Now, it won’t.

On Sunday, a memorial designed by Maya Lin--her first monument since the Vietnam veterans’ wall in Washington seven years ago--will be dedicated to the civil rights movement and to those murdered in it.

Lin’s design--a curved black wall fronted by a circular black granite table with water gently flowing over both--seeks to symbolize both the pain of the segregated old Dixie and the hope of an integrated New South.

But, even as the memorial prepares to open, echoes of old racial battles resound here:

A former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan says he wants to protest the “hideous memorial.” Also, the governor has declined an invitation to attend the opening ceremony, leading some here to accuse him of racism--a charge he denies.

The memorial dominates a plaza near the church where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and near the state Capitol, where the Confederate flag still flies under Old Glory.

The table contains the names of King and 39 others--black and white--murdered during the civil rights movement. It contains also a chronology of significant civil rights events between the May 17, 1954, Supreme Court decision banning school segregation and the April 4, 1968, murder of King.

On the wall is a part of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. “(We will not be satisfied) until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” the memorial vows, recalling King’s 1963 address during the March on Washington and an earlier speech during the bus boycott, which was the catalyst for the nonviolent protest movement.

Civil rights activists say that, although justice and righteousness remain largely unrealized, they have been brought closer by the numerous people who died struggling. The $700,000 memorial, paid for by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is viewed as a way of preserving history and teaching new generations about it.

Morris Dees, executive director of the center, a nonprofit group that monitors and combats racist activity, gestured toward the memorial plaza, which adjoins his office building, saying: “I hope the memorial will educate young people to a small degree and spark their curiousity to get more information” about civil rights. “There’s a lot of racial violence going on today.”

Lin said in a telephone interview from her home in New York that her new project will “let us remember how bad it’s been and how far we have to go.”

Like the Vietnam memorial in the nation’s capital, the names here sear the consciousness, silently testifying to the terror and brutality that divided the nation and to the cause that united it.

Some of the names and descriptions that explain their murders:

--The Rev. George Lee. “Killed for leading voter registration drive” in Belzoni, Miss., in 1955.

--Emmett Louis Till. “Murdered for speaking to white woman” in Money, Miss., in 1955. He was 14 years old.

--Viola Gregg Liuzzo. “Killed by Klan while transporting marchers” on Selma Highway in Alabama in 1965.

--Samuel Younge Jr. “Student civil rights activist killed in dispute over whites-only restroom” in Tuskegee, Ala., in 1966.

The names include the well-known, such as James E. Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael H. Schwerner, three civil rights workers abducted and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964. Their slayings were the subject of the movie “Mississippi Burning.”

Then there are Oneal Moore and Willie Brewster, less well known, both “killed by nightriders” the following year.

Some, like Benjamin Brown, Samuel Ephesians Hammond, Delano Herman Middleton and Henry Ezekial Smith, were killed while protesting racism when law enforcement officials fired on them. Others, such as Birmingham schoolgirls Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, died in racist bombings.

Finally comes King’s name, in the year 1968. The description accompanying it: “Assassinated Memphis, Tn.”

The Vietnam memorial, which was opened in 1982, confronted bitter controversy as some Americans criticized its design as a “black gash of shame.” However, early criticism was swamped in an outpouring of emotion and national catharsis generated by the slabs of polished granite containing the names of more than 58,000 Americans killed in the war.

The new memorial has escaped early condemnation, but already there is controversy here as well because Republican Gov. Guy Hunt, one of 15,000 people invited to Sunday’s dedication, has said he will not participate.

Hunt’s press secretary, Terry Abbott, said that the governor “has been very positive about the memorial and thinks it will be good for the state and good for tourism.”

Abbott said that the governor could not attend the weekend activities, including a dinner Saturday, because “he’s a Baptist preacher and has services all day Saturday and all day Sunday.”

For his part, Raymond Payne can’t wait for the unveiling of the memorial.

Here, he said, the names will “bring back a lot of memories. That’s something that shouldn’t be shut out of people’s minds.”