It was the spring of 1988. I had completed graduate school in architecture and was working toward my internship at an architectural firm in New York when I received a call from an Eddie Ashworth, who said he was calling from the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, and wondered if he could talk to me about the possibility of my designing a memorial for civil rights victims.
At first I was hesitant to respond, since I was acutely aware of the amount of attention I had received from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and I did not want to be typecast as a monument designer. I had politely declined all other offers to design memorials, yet when Mr. Ashworth informed me that there wasn’t a national civil rights memorial, I became very interested in meeting with the center and learning more about what they had in mind for the project.
The building in its then-present shape allowed for little space to create an environmental work. The original vision the center had was to place a stone marker at its entrance, listing the names of prominent figures killed in the civil rights movement and thus preserving the existing entrance to their building. My first instinct was that a list of names would not be sufficient and that accepting the site in its present state wouldn’t be adequate either.
The site was highly problematic, with two symmetrically placed staircases leading up to a small landing, which led to another set of stairs and then into the building.
To create a memorial, I would have to completely rework the front entrance to their building, which early on I conveyed to the center.
Unlike the response I got in Washington, the center was completely open and willing to work with me on the design, allowing me to arrive at my own idea of what the memorial should be.
I knew very little about the civil rights movement. I found it ironic that during my childhood I remembered there was more media attention on the war in Vietnam than on the battles for racial equality that were fought in our own country. I think one of the issues that attracted me to the project was the history of that era, which I knew very little about but felt I needed to focus on.
I studied and reviewed much of the material sent to me by the center before I visited Montgomery. I spent months researching films, literature, and news clips about the time period so that I could get background on the civil rights movement. I was shocked by what I learned, but I was even more disturbed that the information I was learning about our history—events that were going on while I was growing up—was never taught to me in school. Many of the people important to the movement have now been forgotten, with only a few exceptions: Emmett Till, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. More often, the events were forgotten very quickly, and seldom was there justice for the victims.
I knew from the beginning that, unlike the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in which the listing of the soldiers’ names would allow for a personal connection between those who knew a person listed and those who didn’t, for the Civil Rights Memorial a listing of the forty or so prominent victims of the civil rights movement would not be so effectively understood. In asking myself the question of what a memorial to civil rights should be, I realized I had to give people an understanding of what that time period was about. Just as I had learned about what that history embodied—people fighting and sacrificing for racial equality—I felt I needed to make people aware of the history of that era. At the same time, I wanted to respond to the future and to the continuing struggle toward racial equality. I could not envision a closed time line, since I couldn’t see or feel comfortable saying that the civil rights movement had a set beginning or end.
With these thoughts in my mind, I traveled to Montgomery for my first site visit. It was on this first visit to Montgomery that I came across a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King in his “I have a dream” speech: “We are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Immediately I knew that the memorial would be about water and that these words would connect the past with the future. By the time I arrived at the site, I had an idea of what I wanted to do. I remember my first luncheon meeting with Morris Dees and members of the center and the proverbial sketch on a napkin, which I had quickly drawn on the airplane ride down, came out.
The design consisted of a curved water wall on which the quote would be engraved. The plaza below would contain a simple circular sculpture with the history of the civil rights movement engraved upon it. This wall would divide the plaza, creating a singular entrance up to the building and separating the public plaza from the center’s entrance, creating a separate place for the memorial.
I returned to New York and began to work on models and drawings to refine the idea, which we presented to the press a few months later. The presentation included a brief description of the design:
The memorial divides the entrance to the center into an upper and lower plaza. The upper plaza will contain a quiet pool. A thin sheet of water will flow continuously over the front edge of the pool down the face of the curved wall 9 feet high and 40 feet long and inscribed across the face of the wall will be the words that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. paraphrased from the Bible for his “I have a dream” speech: “We are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
The lower plaza will contain a circular stone table 12 feet in diameter, water emerging from the table center will flow evenly across its surface. Carved beneath the flowing-water concentric-circular time lines will be the story of the civil rights movement and the names of persons killed during the struggle.
The memorial’s design uses the idea of asymmetrical balances, aesthetically equal yet not identical. The curved stairway on the right side of the plaza is visually balanced by the circular water table located on the left side and the universal message inscribed across the water wall is conceptually balanced by the specific events and names inscribed across the water table and the table itself is asymmetrical at its base.
The asymmetry is conceptually a very important aspect of the design. In choosing to break the symmetry of the existing building, I am conveying a simple conceptual message—things don’t have to be or look identical in order to be balanced or equal. This underlying theme exists not just in the overall plaza design but it is followed through in the actual design of the water table.
In the first models, the base is located not at the center point of the circle but at one-third the diameter so as you walk around the piece viewing it from different angles, it will change, further emphasizing the idea of asymmetrical balance. This design also creates an extremely long cantilevered side which faces out toward the public entrance, so that as you approach this 14-ton object the base disappears quickly, leaving you with a perception of the pure surface of words—just the writing, just the history.
What is inscribed across the top is a clockwise time line of the civil rights movement beginning in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education and ending in 1968 with Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The text forms a circle in time since a gap is left between 1954 and 1968, signifying that this time line is not closed and that we can only capture a part of that time.
Its design is inspired by a clock or a sundial—detailed with the time markers/dates following clockwise on the outermost edge. It intertwines events in the history of the civil rights movement with people’s deaths. There are forty victims, forty people who were killed, whose deaths are listed here. Of these forty, none of their murderers were convicted [until 1994, when Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Medgar Evers]. When they [the murderers] were prosecuted, they were tried by federal courts as civil rights violators, because at the time local courts would not convict a white man for a crime against a colored person, no matter how strong the evidence was.
I did not feel it appropriate to decide who should be included or what facts would be noted, so the Southern Poverty Law Center worked with historians on the text during the year that it took me to develop the sculpture. At the end we did work together to edit the text. I wanted it to tell the history without becoming too emotional or sensational. So the interest for me was in the retelling of history, trying to be factual, trying not to make it inflammatory, but leaving a brief description.
In choosing to intertwine events with people’s deaths, I was trying to illustrate the cause-and-effect relationship between them. The struggle for civil rights in this country was a people’s movement, and a walk around the table reveals how often the act of a single person—often enough, a single death—was followed by a new and better law.
So many of the victims we don’t know about, so many of the people we never heard about . . . What this movement was really about was the acts of an entire people. The Montgomery bus boycott is just one of many examples of this.
I wanted to convey this even in the specific typeface I chose for the memorial. The lettering style is based upon a Roman text and was designed by John Benson, a master stone engraver and type designer. It’s what he described as the common people’s text as opposed to the more formal serif lettering. Benson, who also acted as a consultant for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, has a different approach to letter cutting than a typographer might. A typographer will compose a text line by line for the printed page; when text is incised in stone, the tablet is read as a whole before it is read line by line. In stone, the engraving begins to take on more life than a normal or standard typeface.
Whenever I design the text, inevitably I get into arguments with the typesetters, who at times have been known to disagree vehemently with Benson’s choices (for the Civil Rights Memorial text, they told the center that it would be illegible), but I implicitly trust Benson to understand the balance in a carved word versus a printed one.
The choice of the leafing also became an issue. I didn’t want to use gold leaf. I thought it would be slightly ostentatious, so we went with platinum leaf. I had originally wanted silver but of course silver tarnishes underwater. So Benson recommended platinum, a silvery white that will not tarnish underwater.
The water is carefully controlled; its movement across the top of the table slowed to an almost imperceptible rate: it appears still until a visitor touches the surface—interacting with the piece—or until the water reaches the edge and turns, appearing to flow almost upside down until it reaches the base. I wanted to completely capture the power of the water—keeping its flow in careful check so that its energy seems to emanate from within the stone.
I chose to use an unpolished black granite. The stone is not shiny when dry, so it is only with the water that the piece becomes reflective. It’s only with the water that this reflectivity is possible, so the piece is actually transformed by the water.
The memorial was dedicated November 5, 1989, with over six thousand people in attendance. Many participants in the movement were present as well as many of the victims’ parents: Rosa Parks, Mamie Till Mobley, mother of Emmett Till, and Carolyn Goodman, mother of Andrew Goodman. As they gathered around the circle, the circle closed and became more intimate, and as the tears that were shed fell onto the table and became a part of it, I realized we had all become a part of the shared experience of the memorial.