“Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope.”
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial opened to the public in August 2011. It features a 30-foot high relief of the man himself. He stands boldly, arms crossed, rising from a chunk of stone which appears to have pulled out from between two similar pieces of granite behind him.
San Francisco-based architecture firm ROMA Design Group, an a/e ProNet client, came up with this dynamic design. Visitors pass through the Mountain of Despair to reach King, and a crescent-shaped wall of granite, 450 feet long, is covered in “excerpts from many of King’s sermons and speeches… the earliest from the time of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama, and the latest from his final sermon, delivered in 1968 at Washington, D.C.’s National Cathedral, just four days before his assassination.”
The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Foundation “reviewed over 900 designs, submitted by architects, designers and students from 52 countries.” So, congratulations to ROMA!
And please join us in celebrating the profound work of Dr. King, the man who led a generation to and through the first, most painful steps of the Civil Rights Movement, and did it in the name of peace. Happy MLK Day!