Rights Memorial Unveiled in Alabama

A generation after Medgar Evers and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were killed, the nation’s first memorial to martyrs of the civil rights movement was unveiled Sunday as relatives expressed hope that young people will carry on the spirit of that turbulent era.

Several people cried as they touched the cool water that flows across a circular black granite slab engraved with important events of the era, including the names of 40 people who died in the struggle for racial equality.

The memorial is of the same material and by the same architect as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

“I hope this will vitalize the struggle, keep it fresh in the minds . . . for the youth,” said Ollie Gordon, a Chicago schoolteacher whose cousin, 14-year-old Emmett Till, was shot to death in 1955 by whites angered that he had spoken to a white woman.

“I talk about Martin Luther King and ask why we celebrate his birthday, and many children don’t know,” she said.

More than 400 law enforcement officers provided security for the dedication ceremony after relatives viewed the monument.

“It’s a very moving experience,” said Myrlie Evers of Los Angeles, whose husband, Medgar, was the highest-ranking NAACP officer in Mississippi when he was assassinated in 1963. “It says to me that there’s hope.”

Julian Bond, the first black state lawmaker in Georgia, said it was also important to remember others besides King and Evers who died in the struggle.

“Without degradating Dr. King, this was a lot more than a Martin Luther King movement,” he said. “Many were ordinary, everyday people who rose above their ordinariness to make a difference.”

The $700,000 monument also honors James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were shot to death during the 1964 Freedom Summer and whose slayings inspired the movie “Mississippi Burning.”

“Poetry in granite” was how Goodman’s mother, Carolyn Goodman of New York, described the memorial designed by Maya Lin.

“Nobody who sees it can (but) feel that it’s a moving, moving piece of art,” Carolyn Goodman said. “It brings that period so vividly alive that you can almost relive it.”

The monument is in front of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a few blocks from the Alabama Capitol, where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office as president of the Confederacy in 1861, and near the Baptist church where King started the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955.

The 9-foot-high granite wall is inscribed with words King chose for his first speech during the bus boycott: “Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Martin Luther King III, a county commissioner in Atlanta, said he thought his father’s words were “very appropriate.”

He said the memorial focuses attention on inequalities that still exist and will serve as a hands-on history lesson for young people.

“Perhaps they can get an understanding of why people lost their lives,” King said.

The law center published a 104-page magazine that tells the story of each person named on the monument, and copies were sent to schools around the country.