MLK memorial tied up in red tape

By Bob Keefe

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Forty-six years after Martin Luther King Jr. led the historic March on Washington that culminated with his “I Have A Dream” speech, plans to erect a monument to the slain civil rights leader and Atlanta icon near the National Mall remain a dream unrealized.

Organizers of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation have spent much of the past year in a bureaucratic tangle over security features at the 4-acre site not far from the Lincoln Memorial where King gave his history-changing speech Aug. 28, 1963.

It’s just the latest holdup for a project conceived more than 20 years ago that was supposed to be completed by now.

“It has been a slow walk in the sun in the desert,” said an exasperated Harry Johnson, president and CEO of the nonprofit memorial foundation.

Tuesday, Johnson stood at the proposed site for the memorial alongside U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to announce a new “Kids for King” educational program and mark this week’s anniversary of the March on Washington.

Instead of the 28-foot-high statue of King planned for the site, however, the backdrop was a plastic banner with a likeness of the proposed memorial.

Congress passed a resolution authorizing the memorial in 1996, and President Bill Clinton signed it into law a decade ago.

Since then, Johnson’s group has raised $106 million of the $120 million needed to build the memorial, and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has issued a letter of credit to pay for the rest.

A Chinese sculptor is about 80 percent done with the granite statue of King, and construction companies are waiting to break ground.

“We have a shovel-ready project,” Johnson said. “We have a construction team ready to begin construction on a project approved by Congress.

“We just need a building permit,” he said.

Johnson says the permit has been held up for more than a year because of differing requirements between the National Park Service and another agency, the National Capital Planning Service, regarding required security features such as removable roadblocks and restricted accesses.

Hugh Vickery, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, stated that the agency “is going through the normal process for approving a memorial for construction.”

“The process has taken some time, but the NPS has been responsive and cooperative throughout the process,” Vickery wrote in an e-mail interview. The foundation, he wrote, “has yet to clear all the necessary hurdles for a permit” — including the incorporation of safety measures in its design.

Johnson says he’ll gladly add whatever security features the park service wants. The problem, he said, is that it won’t tell him what it wants.

There may be some loosening of the bureaucratic red tape, however.

Three weeks ago, in frustration, Johnson wrote to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar asking him to intercede in the situation.

Tuesday, Vickery acknowledged that the letter and accompanying package of information are being reviewed and a reply is likely in a few weeks.

“If all goes well, the design will be complete and the approvals will be granted within a few weeks,” he wrote.

For memorial organizers, construction can’t start soon enough.

The original idea for the project was hatched more than 20 years ago by four Washington-area members of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. King belonged to the fraternity, which is based at his alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta.

Last year, the last of the four fraternity brothers died without ever seeing their dream realized, said Skip Mason, general president of Alpha Phi Alpha.

Other prominent backers have also died in recent years, including King widow Coretta Scott King, former U.S. Rep. Jack Kemp and former Motion Picture Association of America CEO Jack Valenti.

“There is a sense of urgency,” said Mason, who flew up from Atlanta to attend Tuesday’s event at the memorial site.