The King’s Body The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and the.docx

The King’s Body: The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and the
Politics of Collective Memory
Kevin Bruyneel
History & Memory, Volume 26, Number 1, Spring/Summer
2014, pp.
75-108 (Article)
Published by Indiana University Press
DOI: 10.1353/ham.2014.0003
For additional information about this article
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75
The King’s Body
The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
and the Politics of Collective Memory
Kevin Bruyneel

This article examines the politics of memory stemming from the
development and
reception of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial and
Stone of Hope
statue of King that now resides on the National Mall in
Washington D.C. The
article discusses two general contrasting views expressed in the
contest over how
the American nation should remember King. The predominant
viewpoint, which
constructs King as a haloed, consensual figure, is deployed to
endorse the idea
that the United States is now in a post-racial era in which
neoliberal governing
priorities reign supreme. The contrasting viewpoint argues for
portraying King as
a confrontational and radical figure, who would reject the
notion that the United
States has achieved “his dream.”
INTRODUCTION
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, no single
figure
consumes as much commemorative attention in the United
States as does
Martin Luther King Jr. This is reflected in the thousands of
schools across
the country that honor MLK Day each year, in the streets
bearing his
name that span across the nation’s landscape,1 and in the 2011
unveiling
of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial (MLK
Memorial) on
the National Mall in Washington D.C. But what King’s legacy

means in
our time is open to debate. This essay analyzes this debate as it
emerged
during the development and reception of the MLK Memorial and
the
thirty-foot statue of King that is the memorial’s centerpiece.
Kevin Bruyneel
76 History & Memory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014)
As David Blight observed with regard to Frederick Douglass’s
effort
to shape the nation’s memory of the U.S. Civil War: “Historical
memory,
he had come to realize, was not merely an entity altered by the
passage
of time; it was the prize in a struggle between rival versions of
the past, a
question of will, of power, of persuasion.”2 The past does not
speak for
itself, but rather actors, institutions and discourses speak for
and shape the
meaning of the past through the construction of histories and
memories.
There are serious stakes here, because the relationship of a
people to its
past is critical to defining the political imperatives of the
present and the
future. Frederick Douglass knew this about the U.S. Civil War.
In a simi-
lar regard, the memory of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy and
political
identity are central signifiers that define the meaning and

impact of the
Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and thus the
status of
race relations and race politics since that time. In the effort to
define the
past, present and future of U.S. race relations, the collective
memory of
Dr. King is a valuable “prize” in a discursive, political contest.
And as with
any power struggle, there are actors and interpretations that are
winning
and those that are not.
The “winning side” to this point is comprised of elite political
actors
from the two major political parties, multinational corporate
interests and
a large portion of the American population, especially the white
American
population. In their own ways, these actors are involved in
reproducing,
advocating or welcoming an image of King’s political legacy
that is almost
totally devoid of the confrontational and radical politics that he
pursued
while he was alive. Cornel West has called this the “Santa
Claus-ification” of
King.3 I refer to this myth-making as “haloing,” which I draw
from Ernst
Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies. In this book,
Kantorowicz traces the
theological roots and development of the concept of the
sovereign monarch
and its two bodies; the physical, finite “body natural” and the
fictional-
ized “body politic” that can live on, immortally. The “Santa-

Claus-ified”
interpretation of King creates and bestows upon his
fictionalized body
politic what Kantorowicz refers to as the “halo of perpetuity,”
noting that
“we often find the halo bestowed on such figures as might
impersonate
a supra-individual idea or general notion.”4 In this popular
haloed myth,
King stands as a figure of consensus deployed to “impersonate”
the idea
that the U.S. is now a post-racial society in which collective
and structural
concerns about racial equality have been displaced by neoliberal
govern-
77
The King’s Body
ing priorities that emphasize privatization, economic efficiency,
profit and
liberal individualism. We see evidence of this haloing of Martin
Luther
King Jr. in the transformation of his popularity ratings since the
1960s.
In August 1966 King was viewed favorably by 33 percent and
unfa-
vorably by 63 percent of Americans polled.5 While his
leadership role in
the Civil Rights Movement never made him very popular
nationwide, his
approval ratings suffered further during the mid- to late 1960s

when his
politics turned increasingly towards efforts to achieve economic
justice.
During these years, he worked on the Poor People’s Campaign
that
planned to demand from the U.S. federal government “a $30
billion
annual investment in antipoverty measures, a government
commitment to
full employment, enactment of a guaranteed income and funding
for the
construction of 500,000 affordable housing units per year.”6
Fittingly, in
the days leading up to his death, King was marching with
striking Sanita-
tion Workers in Memphis, Tennessee.7 King’s unpopularity at
the time was
also a result of his increasingly outspoken stance against U.S.
imperialism,
specifically the Vietnam War. In the early twenty-first century,
however,
King has an almost unanimous approval rating. In August 2011,
Gallup’s
survey found that 94 percent of respondents viewed King
favorably and
only 4 percent unfavorably. Moreover, 74 percent of Americans
polled in
2011 believed that King’s dream “has been realized or that
major progress
has been made.” This figure is comprised of 51 percent who
said that it
had been fully realized and 23 percent who said that there had
been major
progress towards its realization.8 Thus, one-half to three-
quarters of the
U.S. population now deems the nation to have become, in whole

or in
great part, a post-racial society in which racial inequalities and
injustices
have been resolved and thus the nation’s racial politics and
divisions are
a thing of the past.
However, these figures also demonstrate that one-quarter to
one-
half of the nation’s population does not agree that the United
States has
placed its racial injustices, inequalities, and politics behind it.
Thus, while
the haloed reading of King is currently prevailing, there remains
real
contention over the definition and deployment of his legacy. In
examin-
ing the politics concerning first the development and then the
reception
of the MLK Memorial, I reveal the mainstream political and
corporate
backing for the construction of a haloed, post-racial King. I
place this elite
and popular majority rendering of King’s body politic into
conversation
Kevin Bruyneel
and contrast with views that reject the effort to depoliticize
King’s legacy.
I discuss these competing views among people involved in
designing,

supporting, financing and creating the MLK Memorial, along
with the
critiques from those outside this process and analyses of the
form and the
experience of the MLK Memorial site itself. In all, I argue that
a study
of the MLK Memorial is about more than Martin Luther King
and his
legacy; it provides an insight into the narrow parameters of
contemporary
political discourse and the efforts to resist such constraints in
the name of
a more radical present and future.
DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE MEMORIAL
Officially, the “Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial
Project” began
in November 1996, when President Bill Clinton signed the
legislation
proposing the creation of a memorial to King in the nation’s
capital. The
effort to create the MLK Memorial was initiated and organized
by mem-
bers of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, the first national
collegiate Greek
fraternity created by African Americans, of which King had
been a member
when he was a student at Boston University in the early 1950s.
In 1999,
the National Capitol Planning Commission approved the
location of the
memorial on a four-acre tract next to the Tidal Basin of the
National Mall,
positioning the MLK Memorial between the Jefferson Memorial
and the

Lincoln Memorial. This is the first major memorial on the
National Mall
to honor an African American, and also the first major memorial
that does
not commemorate a war or a U.S. president.
The Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity set up the MLK National Memo-
rial Foundation Project (Memorial Foundation) in order to
oversee the
memorial’s development, design and creation. The Memorial
Foundation
is a non-profit organization comprised of volunteers that
include white
and black elites from the fields of politics, business and the
arts, such as all
four living ex-U.S. Presidents, former First Lady Nancy Reagan,
Andrew
Young (former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations), Colin
Powell
(former U.S. secretary of state), Russell Simmons (music
producer and
entrepreneur), Vernon Jordan (civil rights lawyer and close
advisor to
President Clinton), David Stern (commissioner of the National
Basketball
Association), Tommy Hilfiger (fashion designer) and Harry
Johnson, the
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The King’s Body
former president of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity who has
been the presi-

dent and CEO of the Memorial Foundation since 2002. The
foundation’s
first task was to gain the political and financial support for
placing this
memorial in the symbolic center of the nation’s capital. The
institutional
demands of this process contributed greatly to fashioning a
memorial that
would reproduce a haloed myth of King, because it required
appealing to
the nation’s political and economic elites.
From the formal start of the project in 1996, federal-level
politi-
cal support for the MLK Memorial was decidedly bipartisan.
Although
the Republican Party is not deemed the party of choice for most
African
Americans or known for its support of Civil Rights, in 2003 two
senior
Republicans, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House
Majority Leader
Dennis Hastert, played a prominent part at a press conference to
announce
an ad campaign for the memorial project, as they did at other
events related
to the memorial.9 Moreover, all legislation concerning the
memorial was
passed unanimously or with overwhelming support, including
that of
President Clinton (Democrat), President George W. Bush
(Republican)
and President Barack Obama (Democrat). Compared with the
high level
of partisanship witnessed over the course of these three
presidents’ terms

in office, this was a rare and persistent form of political
consensus among
elite Washington D.C. political actors, which reflected and
reproduced
King’s image as a consensual rather than a confrontational
figure.
This bipartisan consensus can be seen in one of the unanimously
passed pieces of legislation, the 1998 House Joint Resolution
113, which
gave the proposed MLK Memorial official Area 1 status, thus
assuring that
it would be located on the National Mall.10 Among those in the
Senate at
the time was Republican Trent Lott of Tennessee, who was well
known
for his white supremacist, pro-segregation associations and
statements. In
1983, Lott had in fact voted against a federal holiday in honor
of King. He
also gave invited speeches to the white nationalist Council of
Conservative
Citizens. In 2002, during a 100th birthday party for Republican
Senator
Strom Thurmond of South Carolina—the 1948 presidential
nominee of
the pro-segregationist Dixiecrat Party—then Senate Majority
Leader Lott
stated: “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for
him.
We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed
our lead,
we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years,
either.”11
This remark soon led Lott to resign from his leadership post,
although by

Kevin Bruyneel
2006 he had risen back to the post of Majority Whip, before
retiring from
the Senate in 2007. Still, even with all his well-documented
racial views,
positions and alliances, in 1998 Lott was part of the unanimous
Senate
approval of H.J. Resolution 113, securing the first major
memorial to an
African American on the National Mall. Given his 2002
comments, it seems
that the 1998 vote did not signal the sudden transformation of
Trent Lott
into a committed racial egalitarian. Rather, it is evidence of the
successful
transformation of King’s image from a radical and
confrontational figure
to a mainstream, consensual hero that even Senator Lott did not
feel the
need to oppose. The point here is that from 1983 to 1998, Trent
Lott’s
views did not change, King’s did.
The funding for the memorial and the actors who contributed
also
reveal the tendency to support and reproduce a depoliticized,
consensual
image of King. The memorial received little government
funding, with
only $10 million of the estimated $120 million cost coming

from the U.S.
federal government, and even that sum was set out as a
matching fund
tied to private donations. The major corporate donors to the
Memorial
Foundation include General Electric, General Motors, Wal-
Mart, AT&T,
Bloomberg, ExxonMobil, Shell, DuPont, British Petroleum,
Pepsico,
Toyota, Pfizer, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Bank of
America, Lehman
Brothers, J.P. Morgan Chase and McDonalds.12 Here we see an
indica-
tion of the mutually supportive relationship between King’s
popular
haloed image and the prevalent neoliberal set of political and
economic
practices in the contemporary era. King’s economic views and
positions
throughout his life were decidedly social democratic, in
substance, tone
and ideology.13 In his later years, he was increasingly involved
in demands
for well-funded government programs to eliminate poverty,
achieve full
employment, create better and more low-income housing and
secure a
guaranteed annual income for all. These proposals stand in stark
contrast
to neoliberal approaches to the relationship between the state,
the mar-
ket and civil society, and they do not enjoy the approval of the
majority
of the contemporary American public, the two major political
parties or
corporate America. This is also not the legacy that mainstream

politicians
voted to memorialize or corporations chose to fund. Instead,
they voted
for and funded a haloed King who would not challenge elite
political and
economic interests and viewpoints. Evidence of this inclination
towards
81
The King’s Body
creating and advocating a depoliticized, universally acceptable
image of
King can be found in the early choices made for the design of
the memorial.
In 1999 the Memorial Foundation held a design competition,
which
received 900 entries from 52 countries, with the designs judged
by a panel
of architects from the U.S., Mexico, China, India and France.
Ed Jackson
Jr., the memorial’s executive architect from 1996 through and
beyond its
unveiling in 2011, explained how the foundation’s members and
panelists
had conceived their ideas for a memorial design: “we reviewed
and listened
to the words of Dr. King over and over … we came to the
conclusion that
Dr. King was talking about humanity, and not just civil rights.
From that
standpoint of humanity, it took on a larger global perspective,

as opposed
to just focusing on what was happening here in the United
States.”14 In
2000 the foundation declared that the San Francisco-based
ROMA Design
Group had won the competition, with a design thematized
around the
“I Have a Dream Speech” given at the Lincoln Memorial on
August 28,
1963, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Bonnie
Fisher, landscape architect for ROMA, stated that the
memorial’s design
would “not be commemorating a sad event or the grief that
came about
as a circumstance of American history,” but sought “to really
create an
uplifting environment.” Fisher went on to say that it was
important to
the design firm that given King’s “own interest in peaceful
action and
bringing together people of different persuasions that we create
a space
that does the same kind of thing.”15 Thus, the designers’
language invokes
a form of post-racial discourse by distancing the memorial’s
design and
purpose from the racial politics, grief and tragedy of the
“circumstances”
of America’s past, seeking instead uplift and unification.
In consultation with King’s biographer Clayborne Carson, the
ROMA
group decided on the name “Stone of Hope” for the statue,
which is
taken from a line in the “I Have a Dream” speech: “with this

faith, we
will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of
hope.” As
Carson stated in an interview after the announcement of the
selection of
the ROMA design:
That march made possible everything that’s happened in my
life….
Now, to be drawn into a project that takes me back to where it
all
started ... it really does feel good…. From the beginning, my
thought
Kevin Bruyneel
was that the memorial should emphasize King’s ideas. The
physical
look grew out of his words, especially the “I Have a Dream”
speech.16
In the spirit of the “dream” theme, Ed Jackson viewed the
ROMA design
as “both inspirational and emotionally evocative because it best
reflects
King’s dedication to peace, his strength, boldness, and
humbleness in
taking steps to achieve his dream.”17 Although these words
offer a general
sense of King’s vision, views and identity, they avoid an
engagement with
the substance of King’s politics in terms of both his policy aims

and the
means of achieving them.
In his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”—written mere
months
before the March on Washington speech—King defended his
commitment
to direct action, stating: “Nonviolent direct action seeks to
create such
a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has
constantly
refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”18 In
contrast to King’s
language of tension, crisis and force, the Memorial
Foundation’s executive
architect and consultants looked for universal themes, veering
away from
the gritty, tough details of the concerted struggle for civil rights
in the
United States. Similarly, ROMA architect Fisher placed her
design focus
on uplift, peaceful action and unification. Thus, the winning “I
Have a
Dream” design theme for the MLK Monument did not
fundamentally
challenge any political or economic power, interest, party or
ideology in
the contemporary United States. Responding to such
developments in the
production of King’s memory, Michael Eric Dyson proposed
that there
be a “ten-year moratorium on listening to or reading ‘I Have a
Dream,’”
because the almost exclusive focus on the speech had led
American politi-
cal discourse to be “ambushed by bizarre and sophisticated

distortions
of King’s true meaning.”19 Dyson is concerned with how the
limited,
skewed way in which King’s views are remembered and
rearticulated by
the general U.S. population reproduces an increasingly
restrained politi-
cal discourse that presumes, among other things, that racial
conflicts are
a thing of the past. This discursive restraint is reflected in the
quotations
selected for display at the memorial.
The ROMA Group designed the MLK Memorial site as a plaza
that
would have walls engraved with fourteen quotations from
King’s speeches.
These quotations were selected by the Memorial Foundation in
consultation
with a council of historians that included Clayborne Carson,
Henry Louis
83
The King’s Body
Gates Jr., Lerone Bennett Jr. and Marianne Williamson. Since
the Stone
of Hope name stems from the “I Have a Dream” speech, the
Memorial
Foundation wanted these fourteen quotations to be taken from a
differ-
ent source. The panel of esteemed historians obliged, but also
selected

excerpts that reflected universal and unifying themes rather than
direct
political issues, context and confrontation. Carson’s role in the
selection
reflects the complexity in this form of collective memory
production on
the national level, where memories and their meanings are
produced in
and shaped by a wider discursive and structural context. In
2009, Carson
wrote that he “regretted that King’s provocative speeches of his
last years
earned little of the attention lavished on the final passages of
his ‘Dream’
oration.”20 But it was Carson himself who, a decade earlier,
had participated
in entrenching these discursive constraints on the meaning of
King’s legacy.
King’s provocative words are absent from the memorial’s
engraved
quotations, which are taken from speeches that were delivered
from 1955
to just days before his assassination on April 4, 1968. They
include the
following: “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral
universe is
long, but it bends towards justice” (March 31, 1968, delivered
at the
Washington National Cathedral); “Injustice anywhere is a threat
to justice
everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of
mutuality, tied
in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly,
affects all
indirectly” (April 16, 1963, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”);

“If we are
to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical
rather than
sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our
class, and
our nation; and this means we must develop a world
perspective” (1967,
Christmas Sermon, Atlanta, Georgia); and “Make a career of
humanity.
Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will
make
a better person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and
a finer
world to live in” (April 8, 1959, March for Integrated Schools,
Washing-
ton, DC). The most confrontational quotation is probably the
one from
1955: “We are determined here in Montgomery to work and
fight until
justice runs ‘down like water, and righteousness like a mighty
stream.’”
However, even the tone implied by the word “fight” is muted by
the
universalizing, biblical language and the absence of a clear
claim regard-
ing who or what is being fought. These quotations do not
represent the
span of King’s political discourse and thus do not depict a full
picture of
his politics, identity and vision that one would hope to find in a
national
Kevin Bruyneel

memorial. Without a sense of the wider context of King’s views
on race
and politics, quotations that implore twenty-first century
readers to think
of themselves as part of a “single garment of destiny,” to “make
a career
of humanity,” and “transcend race” can easily foster an image
of King
as an advocate of post-racialist views. Whether or not
foundation execu-
tives, project designers or consulting historians intended this
post-racial
construction, by acceding to a universalizing, haloed vision of
King they
risked constituting King’s body politic as one that has moved
beyond
race as a persistent political issue and concern. This vision
commends its
contemporary admirers to move beyond race themselves, not by
engag-
ing racial concerns directly so as to address present-day
injustices, but by
presuming that it is an issue consigned to the past.
Similarly the quotations that are taken from King’s
controversial
and confrontational anti-war speeches fail to reflect his radical
stance. For
example, the quotation that was selected from a speech
delivered at an
anti-war conference in Los Angeles in February expresses a
clear American
exceptionalist theme and claims to be devoid of anger: “I
oppose the war

in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it not in
anger but
with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a
passionate desire
to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the
world.” Most
notably, King set out his commitment to active opposition to the
Vietnam
War in a speech entitled “Beyond Vietnam,” which he gave at
Riverside
Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, exactly one year
before his
death. One quotation from this speech is engraved on the MLK
Memorial
walls, but it is so general that the visitor cannot know the
context in which
it was delivered: “Every nation must now develop an overriding
loyalty
to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their
individual
societies.” This is not the best-known phrase from that speech.
That honor
likely goes to King’s claim that he would speak openly and
directly “to the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own
government.”21
It is not surprising that this radical, virulent critique of U.S.
foreign policy
and the federal government does not appear on the memorial,
but that
this absence is not surprising is itself a telling fact. It
underlines the type
of collective memory of King that is constructed through the
memorial,
which was designed, approved or funded by Memorial
Foundation execu-

tives, designers, creators, consultants and corporate donors.
85
The King’s Body
King’s views on economic inequality are also not reflected in
the
MLK Memorial, or at best they are only hinted at. The one
quotation
on the plaza that comes closest to expressing his concern for
economic
equality comes from his 1964 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “I
have
the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three
meals a
day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and
dignity,
equality and freedom for their spirits.”22 But even this
quotation is posed
in universal terms and as such does not challenge or confront
the elite
political and corporate supporters of the Memorial on whom its
design and
development on public land in the symbolic center of America’s
national
collective memory were dependent. This privatizing dynamic
also involved
the King family itself, specifically his children, who requested
and received
about $800,000 in payment for the rights to use his words and
image in
fundraising for the memorial. King historian David Garrow
criticized this

action, saying that King himself would have been “‘absolutely
scandal-
ized by the profiteering behavior of his children.” In response,
the family
claimed that these proceeds would go to the King Center in
Atlanta, Geor-
gia.23 Nonetheless, King’s words and image turned out to be
privatized
products to be licensed. As I will discuss later, these neoliberal
practices
can also be discerned in the work that went into in the final
construction
of the Stone of Hope statue. In fact, what had been from 1996 to
2007
a rather consensual process in the development of the memorial
became
much more contentious when the focus turned to the specifics of
the
design and production of the statue itself.
The first controversy emerged around the artist chosen to sculpt
the
thirty-foot statue, which stands eleven feet taller than the
statues of Thomas
Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Ed Jackson headed a search
team to find
a qualified sculptor. In 2006, at a stone-carving forum in St.
Paul, Min-
nesota, the team discovered the work and person of master
sculptor Lei
Yixin, a Chinese national who “had carved more than 150
public statues,”
including one of Mao Zedong. As Jackson put it, they had found
someone
of “‘exceptional talent’” who could complete such a
monumental work.24

Lei’s plan was to carve the statue in China out of granite from
China’s
Fujian province.25 The choice of Lei as artist and China as the
source of
the materials and site for carving the statue generated strong
criticism.
The California Chapter of the National Association for the
Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP) passed a resolution opposing the
choice
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because, as Chapter President Gwen Moore said, “It’s an insult.
This is
America and, believe me, there’s enough talent in this country
that we do
not need to go out of the country to bring in someone to do the
work.”26
While a number of people voiced a preference for an African
American
sculptor,27 the most consistent line of critique took Moore’s
more nation-
alistic tone. Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher put it
directly, “the
image of King is being carved out of foreign granite…. It is not
jingoism
but rather a healthy sense of pride and loyalty that mandates
that this
memorial be designed and executed by those who live in the
country
that King so inspired and changed…. King’s message is

universal, but
his story is American.”28 These concerns reflect contemporary
American
anxieties about outsourcing, the status of American
exceptionalism, and
the general fear of China as a rising economic and political
power. There
was also a barely subtle, racialized anti-Chinese element to this
critique,
indicated by a persistent rumor that the Chinese government had
donated
$25 million to the Memorial Foundation in order to secure Lei
Yixin as
sculptor and China as the site for the work and source of the
stone. There
is no evidence that this is true.29
The Memorial Foundation did not accede to the appeals to find
a
new sculptor, and in late 2007 Lei presented his first scale
model of the
sculpture, which is rendered in light brown clay and shows King
standing,
arms crossed, his body emerging from the stone.30 Lei did not
choose
the pose. The ROMA Design Group selected it, with the
approval of
Foundation executives such as Ed Jackson. The image is based
on a 1966
photograph taken by Bob Fitch, who worked as King’s
photographer for
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).31
However, in
June 2008, the United States Commission of Fine Arts (CFA)—
which
had approved the initial design in 2006—expressed its

displeasure with the
image brought to life in Lei’s model, and demanded changes.
According
to the CFA, Lei’s representation of King “features a stiffly
frontal image,
static in pose, confrontational in character.” Thus, the CFA
“recommended
strongly that the sculpture be reworked, both in form and
modeling,
to return to a more sympathetic idea of the figure growing out
of the
stone...,” including changing King’s face so that he would have
“a less
furrowed brow, a softer mouth.”32 The CFA also expressed
concern that
the “‘colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed
statue recalls
a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down
in other
87
The King’s Body
countries.’”33 These official criticisms were echoed in the
public press. For
example, in response to the CFA’s report Washington Post
columnist Fisher
expressed his outrage at Lei’s rendering of King’s image:
“Nowhere but in
this proposed arms-crossed sculpture is King seen in the
arrogant stance
of a dictator, clad in a boxy suit, with an impassive,
unapproachable mien,

looking more like an East Bloc Politburo member than an
inspirational,
transformational preacher who won a war armed with nothing
but truth
and words.”34
In response to these criticisms, James Chaffers, a professor of
archi-
tecture at the University of Michigan and one of two African
American
scholars who served as official artistic consultants to Lei,
conceded that
the “sense of confrontation in the sculpture was not a
coincidence. ‘We
see him as a warrior for peace … not as some pacifist, placid
kind of vanilla,
but really a man of great conviction and strength.’”35 Ed
Jackson, who
consulted with the “King family throughout the process, said
that the bold
representation was intentional.”36 Jackson presented to two of
King’s chil-
dren, Martin Luther King III and Bernice King, four
photographs of Lei’s
rendering of King’s image, and he asked them which most
resembled their
father as they remembered him. As recounted in a USA Today
interview,
Jackson said that “Their response was the first one…. I
informed them
that this was the one that had generated all the controversy
about their
father looking confrontational. Martin said, ‘Well, if my father
was not
confrontational, given what he was facing at the time, what else
could he

be?’”37 According to Jackson, this was the only time that the
King family
was directly involved in consulting on any specific element of
the form or
design of the memorial and statue.38
Both sides of this debate about King’s image agreed that the
model
did not look warm and welcoming, but they differed on what
this said
about King and by extension about American race politics past
and pres-
ent. The CFA saw a confrontational, stiff and stern King as a
problem
that needed correcting, a mistaken representation of the Civil
Rights
Movement leader. By contrast, Professor Chaffers, Ed Jackson
and Martin
Luther King III saw and encouraged these same elements as
speaking to
a truth about King and his politics. Thus, in 2008, what emerged
was a
confrontation over the role of confrontation in the story of
American race
politics and race relations. On the one hand, Fisher’s
description of King
as “an inspirational, transformational preacher who won a war
armed with
Kevin Bruyneel
nothing but truth and words” removed political confrontation

and direct
action from his legacy, and presumed that the war for racial
justice and
equality had, indeed, been won. Fisher’s image is not far afield
from the
story that the CFA looked to reproduce by demanding that Lei
erase any
sign that King might have a reason to furrow his brow or be
confronta-
tional. In contrast to this post-racial imaginary, Chaffers’ active
support
for the confrontational image of King as a “warrior for peace”
rejected
the haloing of King as “some pacifist, placid kind of vanilla.”
Chaffers’
words reflected a concern that the image conveyed in King’s
statue would
reinforce the collective memory of the nation’s political and
economic
elites, in particular, as well as of the majority of Americans who
believe that
King’s dream has been partially or wholly achieved. In this
sense, Chaffers
seemed to fear that the memorial’s purpose would be King’s
honoring of
America and not America’s honoring of King.
In reaction to both the initial design for the statue and to
Chaffers’s
support for its confrontational pose, Ann Althouse, professor of
law at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison and host/author of her
own blog
Althouse, offered the following critique:
The point is the sculptor and his team liked the attitude of

confron-
tation. They wanted MLK the “warrior.” One consultant said
they
rejected the notion of MLK as “pacifist, placid, kind of vanilla.”
But crossed arms expressed resistance and even rejection. Much
as
MLK had cause to express such things in his lifetime, the
question
is what one expression do we now want carved in stone.
Shouldn’t
he be more positive and welcoming? Shouldn’t he love us now
that
we love him?39
The claim that the Stone of Hope statue’s pose of “resistance
and even
rejection” is something he “had cause to express … in his
lifetime” is
a post-racial reading that consigns confrontation over racial
inequities
to a politics of the past, in accordance with the views of the
majority of
Americans, who believe that the nation has fulfilled King’s
Dream of racial
equality and justice.
Thus, the development of the MLK Memorial was based upon
the
support of actors who advocated an image of a non-
confrontational King
who would stand as a “positive and welcoming” figure,
including the
designers, board members, and consultants to the Memorial
Foundation,

89
The King’s Body
leaders of the two major political parties and of many major
U.S. corpora-
tions, along with a large proportion of the U.S. population.
Nonetheless,
during the design and development process, other voices were
heard,
such as those of James Chaffers, Ed Jackson and Martin Luther
King
III, who, each in his own way, defended the image of a
confrontational
King. Jackson is a particularly interesting figure in this regard,
for in his
long tenure as executive architect he found himself both
supporting the
ideal of a universalizing image of King and defending the
representation
of a confrontational King. As in the case of Clayborne Carson,
Jackson’s
varying views demonstrate the complexity of the politics of
collective
memory, which is neither a unidirectional process nor one that
manifests
itself outside of discursive and political context—a context both
men helped
to shape. The debate over the meaning of King’s image and
legacy only
intensified with the unveiling of the MLK Memorial and Stone
of Hope
monument in the summer of 2011.
RECEPTION AND CONTENTION

Despite all the criticism and demands that the image be
reworked, the
finished Stone of Hope sculpture is identical to Lei’s original
model, except
for a slightly softened facial expression (figure 1). The stern,
confronta-
tional pose and Social Realist aesthetic that had so troubled the
CFA and
critics in 2008 remained, and most reviews have accordingly
been quite
critical of the memorial and statue.
In his New York Times review, Edward Rothstein saw a
disconnection
between the Stone of Hope sculpture and the popular memory of
Martin
Luther King Jr., posing a rhetorical question: “Is this the Dr.
King of the
‘I Have a Dream’ speech?” Clearly not, as he described an
“authoritarian
figure” emerging from the rock, one whose crossed arms could
be read as a
sign of “determination, perhaps. Or command. Monumental, not
human.”
Overall, he deemed the statue a failure, but also placed this
assessment
into the wider context of National Mall memorialization:
The failure may also have a larger cause. Many recent
memorials
proliferating along the Mall have trivialized or mischaracterized
their subjects. The World War II memorial seems almost phony
…

Kevin Bruyneel
the Roosevelt Memorial diminishes that president…. Why
shouldn’t
Dr. King, too, be misread—turning the minister into a warrior
or a
ruler, as if caricaturing or trying too hard to resemble his
company
on the Mall?40
Philip Kennicott’s review for the Washington Post judged the
memo-
rial’s aesthetic to be “stuck uncomfortably between the
conceptual and
literal.” For example, “metaphorically, it seems as if the Stone
of Hope
ought to be smaller than the mountain from which it is hewn,
but because
it contains a statue of King, it must be big enough to be
impressive.” Like
Rothstein, Kennicott saw an inherent difficulty in the effort to
memorial-
ize King on the National Mall without turning him into a
monumental
figure. He suggested that the “memorial could be vastly
improved simply
by removing the statue” or by taking a “jackhammer” to it to
whittle it
down to a more subtle form. Kennicott did not see an
authoritarian figure
reproduced in the memorial but rather “from beginning to end,
the Martin
Luther King Jr. Memorial has been about a sanitized, feel-good

fiction of
King, and that seems to have produced a memorial that is
mostly harm-
less and neighborly.”41 These two opposing critiques
demonstrate that
even a national memorial intended to create a particular kind of
collective
memory resists a seamless, singular transmission of meaning.
However,
Fig. 1: Stone of Hope monument, front and south side views.
MLK National Memorial,
Washington, D.C., August 23, 2011. Photos by author.
91
The King’s Body
both reviewers agreed that there was an inherent tension in the
effort to
memorialize King through a statue of this size and monumental
form. In
the effort to make him stand for so much, King’s
memorialization marked
a return to a form of monumentalism that the National Mall had
veered
away from in recent decades.
Kirk Savage has discussed the change in the form and meaning
of
memorials on the National Mall from the 1980s, when there was
a turn
to the creation of the “therapeutic memorial” and the “victim
memo-

rial.” The memorial that marked this change was Maya Lin’s
Vietnam
Veterans Memorial, dedicated in 1982. As Savage notes, Lin
“called her
work an antimonument—a negation of traditional
monumentality,” and
it was meant to neither condemn nor celebrate the Vietnam War
but to
provide a space for visitors to construct their own living
memory of it, to
therapeutically work through the war on their own terms.42 As
to victim
memorials, Savage discusses the Holocaust Memorial Museum
that opened
in 1993 and the Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism,
unveiled in
2000. The latter, which acknowledges the Japanese and
Japanese-American
victims of the U.S. internment policy during World War II,
includes the
inscription “Here We Admit a Wrong.”43 Recall ROMA
designer Fisher’s
explicit claim that the MLK Memorial was not intended to
commemorate
a sad event or be a site of grieving for circumstances of
American history.
Thus, the MLK Memorial was not meant to offer the visitor a
therapeutic
experience concerning the considerable trauma, violence and
struggle that
defines the history of American race relations, or to
commemorate the
victims of this struggle, but rather to utilize King’s memory to
generate
an uplifting and unifying reading of the American and global
present and

future. This reading also places much of the historical weight of
American
racial politics on the actions and identity of King alone.
The predominant, popular memory of the Civil Rights
Movement
collapses the complex story of wide-ranging collective action
into a Great
Man story of King, whose inspirational words in the “I Have a
Dream”
speech led to winning the “war” for Civil Rights.44 Prior to the
MLK
Memorial, all the major monuments on the mall were dedicated
to either
presidents or wars, but King has come to mean even more, as Ed
Jackson
declared: “although he was not a president … his contribution
to what
America stood for and what America should be about was equal
to their
contributions to the creation of America, who we are and what
we stand
Kevin Bruyneel
for.”45 In this sense, King’s body politic has to stand as both a
leader and a
political struggle, as a president and a war. With all this weight
of American
collective memory reproduced in and through King’s body
politic, it is
hardly surprising that the Stone of Hope monument depicts him

more like
a “warrior or commander” than a preacher, “monumental, not
human.”
The critique of the Social Realist form should be placed in this
American
context, in which the popular American collective memory of
King has
turned him into a benevolent monarch who stands as the
sovereign figure
enacting and overseeing the modern history of American race
politics.
These tensions in the effort to produce a collective memory of
King
in this monumental form are highlighted by three specific
aspects of the
production and construction of the statue: the granite stone from
which
the statue was made, the role of labor in constructing the statue,
and the
text carved into the side of the statue.
A key feature of the finished sculpture that was not reflected in
Lei’s
2007 scale model is that the granite out of which Lei carved
King’s image
turned out to be white, rather starkly white. James Chaffers’s
fear that
King would end up being seen as a “kind of vanilla” figure
seems to have
been realized, quite explicitly. To political scientist Char Roone
Miller,
the statue’s color and monumental size makes King appear “as a
giant
white god.”46 The whitening of King, while likely not an
intentional racial

statement, conveys a type of post-racial ideology of color-
blindness familiar
to conservative discourse in the post–Civil Rights era, whereby
whiteness,
while no longer a formal category of legal superiority, remains
the somatic
norm for the privileged status that endows full and
uncompromised citi-
zenship in the American political community.47 Ward
Connerly, an African
American man who was a University of California regent from
1993 to
2005, is a noted example of a conservative who drew upon
King’s memory
to advocate for the end of affirmative action, or what
conservatives refer
to as color-blindness in policy making. Connerly did so by
deploying the
myth of a post-racial King whose views are entirely captured in
the “I Have
a Dream Speech,” and specifically in King’s famous sentence
that he hoped
his children would one day live in a nation in which they would
“not be
judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their
character.” In
1996 Connerly was a leading public advocate for California’s
Proposition
209, which sought to amend the California Constitution to
outlaw affirma-
tive action. The Proposition passed.48 Considered in this light,
the literally
93

The King’s Body
white King of the Stone of Hope reflects one way in which the
haloed
living myth gains popular appeal and serves as a powerful tool
in politics
when he is read as a man not defined by race, but by universal
principles,
beyond or post-race. Here “whiteness” is a universalizing
signifier, not a
racial identity or status. As Memorial Foundation CEO Harry
Johnson
stated in 2011: “We weren’t looking at Dr. King, the African-
American
leader; we were looking at Dr. King, the international
leader.”49 By this
reading King is more an international leader than an African
American
leader. Like most myths, this too is detached from the historical
context
and elides King’s own views such as his insistence in a speech
to the SCLC
in 1967: “Yes, we must stand up and say, ‘I’m black and I’m
beautiful,’
and this self-affirmation is the black man’s need, made
compelling by the
white man’s crimes against him.”50
As to labor on the site, the Memorial Foundation allowed Lei
Yixin
to bring over Chinese sculptors from Hunan province to do the
work.
According to a report in the Washington Post, in 2010, the
prevailing wage
for an American union stonemason was “$32 an hour, plus $12

an hour in
benefits.” After being located by a union investigator, the
Chinese workers
admitted that they did not know how much they were going to
get paid,
but expected to be paid when they returned to China, and had
agreed to
do the job for the sake of “national pride.” In response to
criticism about
this hiring practice, Harry Johnson issued this statement:
“‘While 95% of
the work is being done by American workers, we strongly
believe that we
should not exclude anyone from working on this project simply
because
of their religious beliefs, social background or country of
origin.’”51 It is
hardly likely that the King who marched with striking sanitation
workers
in the days before his assassination would have approved of this
hiring
practice; not as it concerns foreign workers but as it concerns
exploited
workers, non-union workers. And yet, in the contemporary
context of
hegemonic neoliberal capitalist practices, in which the
exploitation of
foreign workers to produce cheaper American products and the
rise of
right to work laws in states across the country place the
interests of work-
ers well behind the priorities of multinational capital, this
hiring practice
underlines the enormous distance between the haloed myth of
King and
the politics and perspective of the body natural King. Johnson’s

defense of
this hiring practice as an act of multicultural inclusion resonates
with the
most conservative form of universalism increasingly invoked
through the
Kevin Bruyneel
“I Have a Dream” image of King.52 More pointedly, the role of
exploited
labor in the construction of King’s statue highlights the
mutually consti-
tutive relationship between neoliberal economic practices and
post-racial
multicultural discourse that justifies these practices.53 Only in
the narrow
discursive context in which the popular memory of King has
become so
emptied of radical political and economic content could Johnson
feel
comfortable making such a lame defense of what King in his
time likely
would have deemed indefensible.
The text engraved in the statue also provoked controversy
immediately
after the public unveiling. The original vision for the monument
included
a long quotation from King’s sermon, “The Drum Major
Instinct,” which
he had given on February 4, 1968, exactly two months before
his death.

Eerily, near the end of the sermon King imagined his own
funeral. He
recommended that whoever delivered his eulogy should not
“talk too
long,” and also offered the following suggestion, which I quote
with the
transcript’s recording of the parishioners’ response:
Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a
drum major for justice. (Amen) Say that I was a drum major for
peace. (Yes) I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of
the
other shallow things will not matter. (Yes) I won’t have any
money
to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of
life
to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life
behind.
(Amen) And that’s all I want to say.54
On Lei’s scale model, there was a four-line portion of the above
quotation
engraved on the south side of the statue, set as follows:
“…Say that I was a drum major for justice.
Say that I was a drum major for peace.
I was a drum major for righteousness.
And all of the other shallow things will not matter.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
While this quotation does not capture the entire meaning of the
full one,
it puts his words into a wider context. However, the monument
unveiled
to the public in 2011 had only a paraphrase of the original

quotation
95
The King’s Body
engraved on the north side of the statue (figure 2). Without
either quota-
tion marks or King’s name, the phrase read as follows:
I WAS A DRUM MAJOR FOR JUSTICE,
PEACE AND RIGHTEOUSNESS
The longer quotation was turned into the shorter paraphrase
after the
Memorial Foundation decided to have the phrase, “Out of the
Mountain
of Despair, a Stone of Hope,” engraved on the south side of the
statue
that first greets visitors entering the memorial site. Lei Yixin
informed Ed
Jackson that he had not scaled the north side for the four-line
quotation.
Thus, as a solution to the issue, the paraphrase was devised by
Jackson
and the project designers.
Vocal criticism of this change began immediately after the
unveiling.
Most notably, African-American author Maya Angelou said the
paraphrase
Fig. 2: Stone of Hope monument, north side, with paraphrased
quotation, August 23, 2011. Photo by author.

Kevin Bruyneel
made King look like an “arrogant twit,” that it “minimizes the
man” and
that “he would never have said that of himself. He said ‘you’
might say
it.”55 Martin Luther King III said, simply: “That was not what
Dad said.”
And satirist Stephen Colbert captured a deeper tension that
pervaded the
project, suggesting that the rephrased words were “to the point.
Not Dr.
King’s point, but still. Brevity is the soul of saving money on
chiselling
fees.”56 As with the choice of white granite stone, there seems
to have
been no deliberate intention to distort King’s words, since the
change
was made in order to address a practical problem, and the aim
of using
the north side space more efficiently took precedence over the
need to
provide an accurate portrayal of King’s words and meaning.
This was
another decision (as in the case of the hiring of non-union
Chinese sculp-
tors who received no assurances of their compensation)
designed to make
the project more cost effective, and the ramifications of this
decision for
the collective memory of King that would be produced by the

memorial
were secondary matters, at best. In this regard, the rewriting of
the Drum
Major quotation is in accord with the contemporary neoliberal
focus
on efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and with the cultural and
political
effort to advocate a mythical haloed King at the direct expense
of a more
accurate portrayal of King’s political, social and personal
views. In this
discursive and mnemonic context, it is little wonder then that
the MLK
Memorial architect, design team and the CFA did not object—in
fact,
Jackson defended the decision when the controversy arose57—
because in
the production of American collective memory the inclination to
distort
King’s words, views and actions is the rule, not the exception.
The monument thus reflects the discursive, material and
political
consequences of the transformation of the collective memory of
King over
the past four decades and the constraints of the wider American
political
discourse. Nonetheless, these discursive constraints are not
reified, fixed
parameters. In this case, they are sites of active contention
regarding the
meaning and construction of King’s legacy.
For example, Don Debar of the Black Agenda Report argued
that
the omission of King’s quotation about the U.S. government

being the
“greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” “is glaring at
a time
when the U.S. is engaged in even more wars than during Dr.
King’s era.”58
As it concerns what King may well have said about U.S. foreign
policy
today, if he were alive, DeBar is likely correct, or at least as
correct as one
97
The King’s Body
could be about such matters. But since the memorial was not
intended to
present the actual spectrum and substance of King’s political
views in any
great detail, this omission was unsurprising. Moreover, given
the actors
and institutions involved in authorizing, funding and creating
the MLK
Memorial beginning in 1996, it is hard to imagine bipartisan
political sup-
port and major corporate donations going to a memorial on the
National
Mall that referred to the U.S. as the world’s most violent entity.
DeBar’s
article concedes this fact by including a photo-shopped image of
the Stone
of Hope monument covered in corporate logos. If anything,
given the
hyper-nationalist, imperialist and vengeful posture of the United

States
since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, comments as
critical of
U.S. foreign policy as King made in 1967 would likely come
under even
more virulent scrutiny today than they and he did at the time.59
Boondocks,
the animated television show created and written by Aaron
McGruder,
posited and satirized this very idea. In an episode entitled “The
Return
of the King,” King emerges from a coma in 2000, having been
critically
wounded but not killed on April 4, 1968. Then, soon after the
September
11 attacks, King suggests that the United States should “love
thy enemy”
and “turn the other cheek.” For this comment, he is deemed a
traitor,
reviled by citizens as he walks down the street, and voted “one
of the ten
most unpatriotic Americans.”60
McGruder’s satire was an effort to resist the dominant
collective
memory of King that is presently winning the political struggle
over the
prize of his memory. McGruder sought to open it up to contest
and reim-
aging, and to place the body natural King into the politics of the
present
day. In so doing, McGruder attempted to undermine the too
seamless
assimilation of King’s politics and views into the constrained
parameters of
contemporary American political discourse. Similarly, DeBar’s

claim that
King’s more radical quotations should have been part of the
memorial was
also an effort to promote a rival version of King’s legacy and a
critique of
contemporary American politics. A somewhat successful effort
at this sort
of resistance to the distortion of King’s legacy can be seen in
the outcome
of the controversy over the paraphrased “Drum Major”
quotation.
The criticism of the paraphrase had an impact. After consulting
with
King’s family, among others, Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar,
head of
the department that oversees the National Park Service,
announced in
February 2012 that the paraphrase would be replaced with the
entire
Kevin Bruyneel
forty-word “Drum Major” quotation. Salazar explained: “With a
monu-
ment so powerful and timeless, it is especially important that all
aspects of
its words, design and meaning stay true to Dr. King’s life and
legacy.”61
However, in December of that same year, Salazar then
announced that due
to the difficulty in making the change, a new solution to the

issue “calls for
removing the quote by carving striations over the lettering to
match the
existing scratch marks on the sculpture that represent the
tearing of the
‘Stone of Hope’ from the ‘Mountain of Despair.’” Lei Yixin
recommended
this plan, which was completed in 2013, as the “safest way to
ensure that
the structural integrity of the memorial was not
compromised.”62 On the
one hand, the protest regarding the quotation and Salazar’s
commitment
to make a change to it showed that the production of collective
memory
is a site of active, fluid and meaningful contestation. People
resist, and
resistance can and does have an impact. On the other hand, it is
also deeply
symbolic that the idea of re-engraving the statue so as to stay
“true to Dr.
King’s life and legacy” was deemed, in the end, a danger to the
statue’s
“structural integrity.” In this case, a commitment to mythical
memory
superseded historical and political integrity. However, this
example also
shows that the relationship between memory and history, the
myth and
the man, and the past and the present are matters of persistent
contention
and complexity, and even more so at the memorial site itself.
I toured the MLK Memorial site on August 23, 2011, the second
day it was open to public viewing. It was a beautiful, sunny day.
Prior to

entering the site, I noticed that across the street from the
memorial five
men were holding a protest. They were a racially diverse group
who wore
t-shirts that had a picture of the Stone of Hope monument with
“Made
in China” written below it. I asked if they were protesting or
picketing
the MLK Memorial. They said they were not against the
memorial itself
and were not seeking to stop people from visiting it, but wanted
people to
know that the statue was “outsourced,” as they put it. The
memorial site
was packed with visitors, easily the most diverse crowd I had
ever seen at
a National Mall monument. Visitors walked slowly around the
site, read-
ing the quotations, but rarely getting too close to them, keeping
what
seemed to be a reverential distance (figure 3). Around the Stone
of Hope
monument, visitors craned their necks up or moved back a fair
distance
to take their photographs. Throughout the site, I could see a
number of
99
The King’s Body
people openly weeping and embracing each other, one woman
singing
impromptu, and other visitors moving through more casually.

I had conversations with a few people, but will discuss my
encounter
with one person in particular. To take in the wider scene I stood
next to
the Tidal Basin, about twenty yards straight back from the front
face of
the Stone of Hope monument. There, I struck up a conversation
with
the person standing next to me, an African American man in his
seventies
named Paul, who was from North Carolina and now lived in
Pennsylva-
nia. I asked him what he thought of the monument, its size and
form,
mentioning that a number of people had been critical of it. Paul
shrugged
his shoulders and said that it was good, and that “he” (King)
deserved it;
that it was “about time.” Paul said he had lived in D.C. at the
time of the
1963 March on Washington, and that his wife had been actively
involved
with the Civil Rights Movement, but that he had not been so
active. I
asked why not, and he said that if someone had tried to hit him
or called
him “that name” (a racial slur, I presumed), he did not think he
could
have stuck to a nonviolent response to such provocations, so he
had kept
his distance. The conversation veered into a discussion of
contemporary
politics. Paul criticized the efforts of the Republican Party to
take down
President Obama, which he attributed in great part to the fact

that the
Fig. 3. MLK Memorial visitors viewing engraved quotations,
August 23, 2011.
Photo by author.
Kevin Bruyneel
president was black. We also discussed the increasing divide
between the
rich and the poor in the country and the problem of money in
politics.
In this spirit, he mentioned his plan to attend the march on
Saturday
August 27, 2011, organized by Reverend Al Sharpton’s National
Action
Network, the NAACP, and a number of labor unions such as the
American
Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State,
County
and Municipal Employees. Flyers for the march were being
handed out
as people entered and exited the memorial site. Advertised on
the flyer
as the “March and Rally on Washington: Let the Masses Be a
Part of the
Opening of the King Memorial and Stand up for Jobs and
Justice,” the
march was to begin at Constitution Ave. NW and 17th Street
NW and
end at the MLK Memorial site. The flyer drew a historical and
political line

connecting Lincoln to King, as typeset: “FROM THE
EMANCIPATOR
(ABRAHAM LINCOLN) TO THE LIBERATOR (MARTIN
LUTHER
KING JR.) THE COLLECTIVE JOURNEY OF CIVIL RIGHTS
TO BE
REAFFFIRMED.” Here we see a Great Man version of history
that also
affirms the role of collective effort. As with the MLK Memorial
dedication
that was planned for Sunday, August 28, the march and rally
were also
postponed due to Hurricane Irene. The march eventually took
place on
October 15, 2011, by which time contingents from the emergent
Occupy
movement also participated.63
As with my other impressions on and around the site that day,
my
conversation with Paul was not bound by any singular theme,
one-dimen-
sional memory or easily defined narrative arc. Paul thought the
monument
was a worthy tribute to King, even while he himself could not
abide by
the philosophy of nonviolent direct action. To Paul, the
memorial clearly
did not mean an end to the struggle for racial justice or
evidence of a
post-racial triumphant moment for the American nation. He saw
race as
being at the center of Republican efforts against Obama and he
planned
to attend the March for Jobs and Justice so as to oppose the
injustice of

contemporary economic conditions. Similarly, while there was
celebra-
tion and joy at the memorial site, there was also weeping and a
sense of
melancholy evident among many. Flyers for many causes, not
just the
planned march, were being distributed, and the five men
protesting the
outsourcing of the monument stood their ground across the
street. Thus,
while there is a powerful and ubiquitous narrative of the haloed
living
myth of King reflected and produced throughout the MLK
Memorial site,
101
The King’s Body
from the ground up the threads of memory tie together in
myriad ways,
telling diverse stories. These stories include that of a Great Man
history
of King and the Civil Rights Movement, but they also reveal the
role of
agency and the potential for reimagining and resisting dominant
narratives.
After I toured the monument, I walked over to the Lincoln
Memo-
rial. Just before 2 p.m., a 5.8 level earthquake struck Virginia. I
did not
feel it, but eventually saw rescue, fire and police vehicles
moving rapidly

about, sirens blaring, and a number of people scurrying. Once I
discov-
ered what had occurred, I headed back to the MLK Memorial to
see if
there was any damage. The monument was fine, and people had
begun
venturing back to the site to continue their tours. But the scene
at the
center of the National Mall was entirely different: National Park
officials
had set up a very wide perimeter around the Washington
Monument,
letting no pedestrian anywhere near it and rerouting traffic away
from it.
The earthquake had caused cracks in the pyramidion, which is
the top
part of the monument.64 The tallest, most recognizable
monument on the
National Mall was now unstable, cracking, and a danger to those
below.
The ground upon which it stood had suddenly shifted. Tourists
who
had come to admire the structure as a central ritual in the
experience of
American collective memory were now more likely in fear of it
collapsing
on top of them.
As writers, sometimes metaphors do not so much occur to us as
fall
in our laps. For all the attention and energy that go into
building and
critiquing the memorials and monuments that help to shape a
nation’s
collective memory, the ground upon which these memories
stand is not

permanently fixed. It may seem fixed for a while or from one
interpretive
angle, and some people may prefer that it stays fixed—admired
and rep-
licated, not critiqued and reimagined. But when the ground of
memory
shifts or is revealed to be more open and fluid than once
thought, the
politics of meaning and memory open up, generating tension
and anxiety,
but also enabling greater agency and action.
CONCLUSION
The past is a resource that can be mined by any and all, even
while it is
deployed to most powerful effect by dominant political actors
and dis-
Kevin Bruyneel
courses. In this regard, over the last four to five decades Martin
Luther
King’s body politic has become central to how the U.S.
population tells
the story of the nation’s racial history. From kindergarten
through college,
almost all students in the United States celebrate the annual
MLK holiday.
Their sense of citizenship and its relationship to America’s
racial past and
future is, in a meaningful way, produced and reproduced

through the story
of King’s life and legacy, most often by means of the benign
tropes of the
haloed living myth with which we are familiar. The MLK
Memorial and
Stone of Hope monument are sure to become prevalent features
of these
annual celebrations. For this reason, it may turn out to be a
good thing
that King’s statue seems as incongruous as it does—
monumental, stern,
unwelcoming, white—for it may provoke those experiencing it
to realize
that the monument does not fit seamlessly into the dominant
memories
and myths about King, and to seriously grapple with that
tension.
One cannot foresee how people will read and react to the MLK
National Memorial in the long term. Civil rights and labor
organiza-
tions have already held marches in which the MLK Memorial
serves as
the final destination. One can only imagine what marches,
speeches and
demonstrations may be held there in the future, and how they
may resig-
nify the meaning of the site itself and shape new political
memories and
challenges. Kirk Savage’s observations about the Lincoln
Memorial are
instructive in this regard:
the Lincoln Memorial was once intended to be the Mall’s
supreme
expression of post–Civil War national “reconciliation,” a

whites-only
affair that abandoned millions of African Americans to
segregation
and disenfranchisement. Who could have predicted that the
memo-
rial would have become the country’s most powerful symbolic
space
for civil rights and racial equality? Or that one day crowds
would
gravitate here to mark the election that brought a black man to
the presidency? The lesson to be learned is that the subjectivity
of
memorial space, once unleashed, cannot be so easily
controlled.65
For the foreseeable future, it seems that the MLK Memorial will
end up
serving primarily as a site for the reproduction of a consensual
narrative
in American collective memory, one that advocates the idea that
the
contemporary U.S. is a post-racial polity. However, as the use
of the Lin-
coln Memorial as a political site demonstrates, political actors
engage in
103
The King’s Body
movements to change the world and in so doing they generate
their own
stories, histories and memories, and challenge those that do not
reflect

their views and experiences. And in that process memorials
rarely, if ever,
get the final word. In politics, as in memory, nothing is set in
stone.
NOTES
I thank the organizers and participants of the 2009
“Unstructuring Politics
Workshop” at the University of Oregon, where this essay first
came to life, and
subsequent discussants and readers for their advice on later
drafts. In particular, I
thank Victoria Hattam, Joseph Lowndes, George Shulman,
Priscilla Yamin, Michael
Hanchard, Gerald Berk, Dennis Galvan, Mark Reinhardt, Simon
Stow and the late
Joel Olson, whose radical political life lives on in our
memories. I am grateful to
the anonymous readers of History & Memory for their
constructive suggestions.
And I very much appreciate the support for research and writing
provided by the
Babson College Faculty Research Fund.
1. For the history and politics of naming streets after Martin
Luther King Jr.,
see Derek H. Alderman, “Street Names as Memorial Arenas:
The Reputational
Politics of Commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. in a Georgia
County,” His-
torical Geography 30 (2002): 99–120; and Derek H. Alderman,
“Creating a New
Geography of Memory in the South: (Re) Naming of Streets in
Honor of Martin
Luther King, Jr.,” Southeastern Geographer 36, no. 1 (1996):

51–69.
2. David Blight, “For Something beyond the Battlefield:
Frederick Douglass
and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War,” Journal of
American History
75 (March 1999): 1159.
3. West has used this phrase on a number of occasions,
including at the Janu-
ary, 2010 celebration of King held at the Ebenezer Baptist
Church in Atlanta,
Georgia. See Terry Stopshire, “Stop the ‘Santa-Clausification’
of Martin Luther
King, Pleads Dr. Cornel West,” Rolling Out (online magazine),
January 18, 2010.
http://rollingout.com/entertainment/stop-the-santa-claus-
ification-of-martin-
luther-king-pleads-dr-cornel-west/ (accessed June 10, 2013).
West is one of a
number of scholars and public intellectuals who have discussed
and bemoaned the
distorted representations and uses of King’s legacy. See, for
example, Gary Daynes,
Making Villains, Making Heroes: Joseph R. McCarthy, Martin
Luther King Jr. and
the Politics of American Memory (New York: Garland Science,
1997); Vincent
Harding, Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero, rev. ed.
(New York: Orbis
Books, 2008); Michael Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The
Memphis Strike,
Kevin Bruyneel

Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W.W. Norton,
2007), especially
“Epilogue: How We Remember King”; and Thomas Jackson,
From Civil Rights
to Human Rights: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Struggle for
Economic Justice
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
4. Kantorowicz’s phrasing stems from his discussion of “late
antique art.”
See Ernst A. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in
Medieval Political
Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957): 78–79.
5. Jeffrey M. Jones, “Americans Divided on Whether King’s
Dream Has Been
Realized,” Gallup Politics, August 26, 2011. See answers to
“Views about Martin
Luther King Jr.,”
http://www.gallup.com/poll/149201/Americans-Divided-
Whether-King-Dream-Realized.aspx (accessed September 4,
2011).
6. Mark Engler, “Dr. Martin Luther King’s Economics: Through
Jobs, Free-
dom,” The Nation, 290, no. 4. (February 1, 2010),
http://www.thenation.com/
article/dr-martin-luther-kings-economics-through-jobs-freedom.
7. For an excellent history of the Memphis strike and King’s
relationship to it,
see Honey, Going Down Jericho Road.

8. Jones, “Americans Divided.” See answers to “Views about
Martin Luther
King Jr.”
9. “Media Campaign Launched on Capitol Hill,” Build the
Dream: MLK
Memorial Newsletter 1, no. 2 (2003), 1.
10. H.J. Res. 113 (105th): Approving the Location of a Martin
Luther King, Jr.
Memorial in the Nation’s Capital. 105th Cong., 2nd sess. Passed
House, June 22,
1998; Passed Senate, June 25, 1998; Signed by President, July
16, 1998; upon
enactment, became Public Law No: 105-201.
11. John Mercurio, “Lott Apologized for Thurmond Comment,”
CNN Politics
December 9, 2002, http://articles.cnn.com/2002-12-
09/politics/lott.com-
ment_1_dixiecrat-party-lott-strom-
thurmond?_s=PM:ALLPOLITICS (accessed
August 3, 2011).
12. The company names are drawn from the detailed Major
Donor List that I
obtained directly from the MLK National Memorial Foundation.
13. Nikhil Singh refers to this period as the time when King
incorporated “cur-
rents of democratic socialism and black nationalism into his
thinking.” Nikhil Pal
Singh, Black Is Not a Country: Race and the Unfinished
Struggle for Democracy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004): 3.

14. As quoted in Cynthia Gordy, “The MLK Memorial’s
Complicated His-
tory,” The Root (online magazine), posted August 22, 2011,
http://theroot.
com/print/55284 (accessed July 6, 2013).
15. Julia Flynn Siler, “Making a Man into a Monument: Meet
the Architect
behind the MLK Memorial in DC,” Wall Street Journal (online
edition), October
9, 2012. The quotations I discuss are from the WSJ video
interview with Bonnie
105
The King’s Body
Fisher, available at
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444138
104578030691017117624.html#articleTabs%3Dvideo (accessed
July 6, 2013).
16. Ann Rochell Konigsmark, “Stanford Historian Assists
Design of King Memo-
rial: Man Who Witnessed ‘Dream’ Speech Contributes to
Winning Plan Built on
Imagery, Interpretation of Leader’s Life,” San Jose Mercury
News, September 24,
2000, 1B.
17. Lisa L. McGlory, “The Real Story behind the MLK
Memorial: Dr. Ed
Jackson, behind the Legacy of the Monument,” ICDC Life: The
Official Magazine

of ICDC College, January 13, 2012 (ICDC College Website),
http://blog.icdc-
college.edu/2012/01/13/real-story-mlk-national-memorial-part-
1/ (accessed
July 7, 2013).
18. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,”
April 16, 1963,
as reprinted in Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait
(New York: Signet
Classic, 2000), 67.
19. Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There with You: The
True Martin Luther
King Jr. (New York: The Free Press, 2000): 15–16.
20. Clayborne Carson, “King, Obama, and the Great American
Dialogue,”
American Heritage 59, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 27.
21. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam,” Address
delivered to the
Clergy and Layman concerned about Vietnam, at Riverside
Church. New York
City, New York, April 4, 1967. Full transcript available at
http://www.stanford.
edu/group/King/liberation_curriculum/speeches/beyondvietnam.
htm.
22. For a full list of the quotations, see the following website:
National Park
Service, Martin Luther King Memorial Jr., “Photos and
Multimedia,” “Virtual
Tour,” “Quotations,”
http://www.nps.gov/mlkm/photosmultimedia/quota-
tions.htm (accessed May 20, 2012).

23. See Associated Press, “Family of Dr. King Charged Group
Building His
Monument,” New York Times, April 17, 2009, A15.
24. Gordy, “The MLK Memorial’s Complicated History.”
25. Brett Zongker, “Chinese Sculptor Picked to Carve Image
for King Memo-
rial,” Washington Post, February 16, 2007, C07.
26. “Some Say Memorial Design Misrepresents MLK Jr.,”
National Pub-
lic Radio, December 5, 2007,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.
php?storyId=16918803 (accessed December 11, 2013)
27. For example, see Patricia Cohen, “The King Memorial:
Dreams at Odds,”
New York Times, September 24, 2007, E7.
28. Marc Fisher, “Time to Start over on MLK Statue,”
Washington Post, May
11, 2008.
29. Personal communication, July 3, 2012. I contacted the
Memorial Founda-
tion to inquire about any donations from the Chinese
Government. In an email, a
Kevin Bruyneel

spokesperson stated that “the Memorial Foundation has not
received any funding
from the government of China,” and provided me with an
itemized list of Major
Donor contributors to support the claim.
30. Images of Lei Yixin’s 2007 model for the Stone of Hope
statue are available
through hyperlink at “Some Say Memorial Design Misrepresents
MLK Jr.”
31. The photograph is of King standing arms crossed, at his
desk, with a pic-
ture of Mahatma Gandhi over his right shoulder. It became the
book cover for
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. Clayborne
Carson (New York:
Warner Books, 1998).
32. “Fine Arts Commission Approves King Statue Redesign,”
June 20, 2008,
Artinfo, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/27926/fine-arts-
commission-
approves-king-statue-redesign/ (accessed December 11, 2013).
33. Thomas A. Leubke, Secretary to the U.S. Commission of
Fine Arts, “Let-
ter to Joseph M. Lawler, National Park Service, National
Capitol Region,” U.S.
Commission of Fine Arts, April 25, 2008. The letter can be
found on the CFA
website,
http://www.cfa.gov/meetings/2008/apr/20080417_01.html
(accessed
December 11, 2013); see also Michael E. Ruane, “Unhappy with
‘Confrontational’

Image, U.S. Panel Wants King Statue Reworked,” Washington
Post, May 9, 2008,
A01.
34. Fisher, “Time to Start over.”
35. Quoted in Ruane, “Unhappy with ‘Confrontational’ Image.”
The other
scholar was Jon Lockard, senior lecturer in the Department of
Afroamerican and
African Studies at the University of Michigan.
37. Melanie Eversley, “MLK Jr. Memorial Confronts
Controversy,” USA Today,
July 5, 2011,.
38. See Joi-Marie Mackenzie, “Chief Architect, Dr. Ed.
Jackson, Reflects on
Martin Luther King Memorial,” Loop 21 (online magazine),
2011 http://www.
loop21.com/content/chief-architect-dr-ed-jackson-reflects-
martin-luther-king-
memorial?page=1 (accessed, July 7, 2013).
39. Ann Althouse, “Does This Statue of Martin Luther King Jr.
Look Too Much
Like That Statue of Saddam Hussein We Pulled down in
Baghdad?” Althouse, May
9, 2008, http://althouse.blogspot.com/2008/05/does-this-statue-
of-martin-
luther-king.html (original emphasis) (accessed December 11,
2013).
40. Andrew Rothstein, “A Mirror of Greatness, Blurred,” New

York Times,
August 25, 2011, C23.
41. Philip Kennicott, “Memorial Review: Stuck between the
Literal and the
Conceptual,” Washington Post, August 26, 2011.
107
The King’s Body
42. Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington D.C., The
National Mall, and
the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley:
University of California
Press, 2009), 266.
43. Ibid., 284–91.
44. For a concise, smart reading of the “King-centric” account
of the Civil
Rights Movement, see Singh, Black Is Not a Country, 5.
45. Mackenzie, “Chief Architect, Dr. Ed Jackson.”
46. Char Roone Miller, “Great White Hope: The National
Martin Luther King
Memorial,” Contemporary Condition October 5, 2011,
http://contemporarycon-
dition.blogspot.com/2011/10/great-white-hope-national-martin-
luther.html
(accessed July 3, 2012).
47. For the notion of the white somatic norm, see Charles
Mills, The Racial

Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), and for
the privileged racial
status of whiteness in the post–Civil Rights United States, see
Joel Olson, The
Abolition of White Democracy (Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004).
48. For an analysis of Connerly’s deployment of King’s legacy
in support of
Prop. 209, see Dyson, I May Not Get There with You, 25–27.
50. Martin Luther King Jr., “Where Do We Go from Here?”
Speech at South-
ern Christian Leadership Conference, Atlanta, GA, August 16,
1967, available
at http://www.famous-speeches-and-speech-topics.info/martin-
luther-king-
speeches/martin-luther-king-speech-where-do-we-go-from-
here.htm (accessed
July 3, 2012).
51. Annys Shin, “As Chinese Workers Build the Martin Luther
King Memorial,
a Union Investigates,” Washington Post, November 23, 2010.
52. For an acute assessment of the racially conservative nature
of multicul-
turalism, see Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy, chap.
4, “The Failure of
Multiculturalism and Color Blindness,” 95–123.
53. For an example of the way that the “plasticity” of King’s
image can be
deployed to support neoliberal policies, see Thomas Jackson’s

discussion of how
Bill Clinton used King’s memory in 1993 to support Clinton’s
policy agenda,
including “ending welfare as we know it,” in Jackson, From
Civil Rights to Human
Rights, 361.
54. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Drum Major Instinct,”
Ebenezer Baptist
Church, Atlanta, Georgia. February 4 1968, available at
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.
edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_the_drum_maj
or_instinct/
(accessed, July 4, 2012).
55. Gene Weingarten and Michael E. Ruane, “Maya Angelou
Says King Memo-
rial Inscription Makes Him Look ‘Arrogant,’” Washington Post,
August 30, 2011.
Kevin Bruyneel
56. Quoted in Beth Stebner, “Out of the Mountain of Despair:
Inscription
on Martin Luther King Memorial Maya Angelou Said Made
Civil Rights Leader
Sound Like ‘an Arrogant Twit’ to be Changed,” Daily Mail
Online January 4,
2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2086560/Martin-
Luther-King-
memorial-quote-changed-Maya-Angelou-twit-comment.html
(accessed July 4,

2012).
57. Michael Ruane, “Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
Architect Says Contro-
versial Inscription Will Stay,” Washington Post, September 3,
2011.
58. Don DeBar, “The Missing Quote from the MLK Memorial,”
Black Agenda
Report, January 17, 2012,
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/missing-
quote-king-memorial (accessed July 5, 2012).
59. Regarding the criticism that King received for his anti-war
stance at the
time, including criticism from the mainstream press and from
members of King’s
SCLC, see Harding, Martin Luther King, especially chap. 5:
“The Land Beyond:
Reflections on King’s ‘Beyond Vietnam’ Speech.” Harding
drafted the “Beyond
Vietnam” speech for and in consultation with King.
60. Aaron McGruder, “The Return of the King,” Boondocks,
season 1, episode
9, first aired, January 15, 2006.
61. Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of the Interior,
“Salazar, Jarvis
Announce Plan to Correct ‘Drum Major Quote’ on the Martin
Luther King Jr.
Memorial,” press release, U.S. Department of the Interior,
Washington, D.C.,
February 10, 2012, available at
http://www.doi.gov/news/pressreleases/
Salazar-Jarvis-Announce-Plan-to-Correct-Drum-Major-Quote-

on-the-Martin-
Luther-King-Jr-Memorial.cfm (accessed July 5, 2012).
62. Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of the Interior,
“News Release:
Secretary Salazar Provides Update on Resolution to Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.
Memorial,” press release, U.S. Department of the Interior,
Washington, D.C.
December 11, 2012, available at
http://www.doi.gov/news/pressreleases/secretary-
salazar-provides-update-on-resolution-to-dr-martin-luther-king-
jr-memorial.cfm
63. Susan Svrluga and Bill Turque, “D.C. Marchers Rally for
Jobs and Justice,”
Washington Post, October 15, 2011.
64. National Park Service, “Washington Monument Inspection
Finds Addi-
tional Cracks,” press release, August 25, 2011, available at
http://www.nps.gov/
wamo/parknews/washington-monument-inspection-finds-
additional-cracks.htm
65. Savage, Monument Wars, 310.
Assignment
Write one paper that argues a succinct thesis by examining, in
depth, a single designed object. It should be supported by
relevant outside literature (using at least four different
academic sources), appropriately cited, and it should be
illustrated as needed to orient your reader and clarify your

argument. The paper should be 1250 to 1750 words long (about
5-7 pages), not including footnotes.
Designed object: Kindle
Thesis:
The invention of the e-Book is a turning point for the
development of information, some people insist that we should
follow our traditions; some people insists to replace the hard
copies by the e-Book in order to responsible for the
environment, some people claims that there are too many people
abandoned themselves on the technology world; some people
contends that digital data lasts much longer than paper copies.
Proposal:
My final paper will argue the benefits and baneful of Kindle and
its contributions and deficiencies to the society. In my paper,
there will be the compare and contrast of the traditional books
with the Kindle. I will discuss them in several aspects, such as
environmental problems, social justice, people’s habits and
lifestyle, the revolution of technologies, health issues, etc. After
a brief introduction of the Kindle, I will give my personal and
some of professionals’ point of view about whether we should
encourage the development of Kindle. For now, panopticism,
orientalism, and ethics in design will be discussed in my paper
to strengthen my argument. Since my topic is very
controversial, there will be lots of examples, statistics,
information and recourses to be provided in order to let the
reader understand whether they should use Kindle or not. Last
but not the least, the related social issues are going to be
discussed which brought by the Kindle and meritorious
suggestions will be applied in my paper.
-Introduction of modern technology

The first two paragraphs are mainly about introducing the
importance of modern technology and how modern technology
changed our life. Then I will introduce the Kindle from amazon.
Also, I will discuss the controversy between hard copies and
electronic books to strengthen my thesis.
-The benefits and disadvantages of hard copies.
Basically, the issue we are facing is environmental friendly
problems. I will use several source to help me build an idea
about paper is not sustainable enough for us society.
-The benefits and disadvantages of kindle
Firstly, I will introduce the benefits in one paragraph in using
three sources from New School library that I found. As for the
disadvantages, I will discuss the privacy issue, obsession on the
Internet, and the usage of the electronic devices.
-Ethics in design
I will talk about ethics in design both on paper and kindle.
Since they both have advantages and disadvantages, and I do
not have an opinion supporting on which, as a result, I will still
keep neutral on discussing them.
-Panopticism on Kindle
As we all know, if you use an electronic device to download
book, there must be histories or traces. Some people’s privacy
maybe leak by hackers or accidents. Your catalogs of books are
not secrets and there is no privacy anymore.
-Memory on hard copies
Reading a hard copy is a tradition; we cannot abandon the great
invention of books. Some valuable hard copies are pricing, and
they are memorable and meaningful.
-Climate and sustainable
Both electronic devices and paper are all result in tons of

pollution. However, we should consider which one we can
encourage at. There will be lots of introduction and resources
about pollution create by paper and electronic devices.
-Conclusion
I will explain my thesis again. My essay would not have a
solution, but a hint or an alert for people to realize what kind of
ways of reading they should follow after my introduction. The
invention of kindle is smart, efficient and useful. However,
sometimes a good design is a wrong design.
Bibliography
JSTOR:
1.Amazon's "Library," Kindle Ebook Loans, and What It All
Means.
Harris, Christopher. 2011. “Amazon′s ″library,″ Kindle Ebook
Loans, and What It All Means”. American Libraries 42 (11/12).
American Library Association: 21–21.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41500778.
2. The Mediated Book
Supreme Court Economic Review, Vol. 19, No. 1 (January
2011), pp. 51-65, Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/664562
3. Kindling: The Amazon e-Reader as an Educational Tool
Brezicki, Colin. 2010. “Kindling: The Amazon E-reader as an
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