Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial

The first National Mall memorial to honor a Black American and someone who never held the presidency, standing on a direct sightline between the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials as a deliberate claim on the nation's founding promises.

Members of Alpha Phi Alpha, the historically Black fraternity Martin Luther King Jr. joined as a student, began campaigning for a national memorial to him in 1984. Congress authorized the memorial in 1996, and a site on the Tidal Basin — on a sightline between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials — was selected in 2000, positioning King's memorial in direct visual dialogue with the nation's founding and its Civil War reckoning.

Following a design competition, the memorial's master plan by ROMA Design Group centered on a single line from King's 1963 'I Have a Dream' speech: that hope could be hewn 'out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope.' Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin was commissioned to carve the central feature, a 30-foot granite figure of King emerging from a split boulder, a choice that drew some criticism at the time over both the artist's nationality and the imported granite.

Groundbreaking took place in 2006 and the memorial was dedicated on October 16, 2011, after Hurricane Irene delayed the original August ceremony. A curved inscription wall surrounding the statue carries fourteen quotations drawn from King's speeches, sermons, and writings. In 2013, after public criticism that a paraphrased quotation about being a 'drum major for justice' distorted King's meaning by omitting its original context, the National Park Service had the inscription ground off the stone.