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Maya Lin- MLK Memorial

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Maya Lin was asked to build the MLK memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1989. The monument consisted of two elements: a curved black granite wall inscribed with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a Dream” speech and a 12-ft disk inscribed with the dates of major civil-rights-era events and the names of 40 martyrs to the cause. Lin stated, “The minute I hit that quote I knew that the whole piece had to be about water,” Lin said. “I realized that I wanted to create a time line: a chronological listing of the Movement’s major events and its individual deaths, which together would show how people’s lives influenced history and how their deaths made things better.”

Civil Rights Memorial (1988–89), Montgomery, Alabama. Maya Lin, creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, was commissioned to design the monument. Lin found her inspiration in the words “until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” a paraphrase from the Book of Amos that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used in his “I Have a Dream” speech and at the start of the Montgomery bus boycott.
Maya Lin, Civil Rights Memorial
“The minute I hit that quote I knew that the whole piece had to be about water,” Lin said. “I realized that I wanted to create a time line: a chronological listing of the Movement’s major events and its individual deaths, which together would show how people’s lives influenced history and how their deaths made things better.”