WASHINGTON –Kay Hixson was in high school when Martin Luther King Jr. came to her hometown of Chicago. She told her mother she was going to the library, but took part in a protest march instead. Her cover was blown when her photo ended up in the paper.
The march was relatively peaceful, but the Chicago of Hixson's youth was a place of violent racial division. The home of family friends was bombed when they dared to move into a white neighborhood.
So the moment was bittersweet Tuesday as Hixson, who now lives in Washington, looked up at the stern-faced, granite depiction of King unveiled this week on the National Mall. Her heart swelled with pride, but the recollections were unsettling.
"It brings back all the memories, some sadness," said Hixson, who described herself as "overwhelmed" by the memorial, the first for a non-president or an African-American on the Mall.
For visitors to the nation's capital, King's name and visage will now be linked to neighbors named Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt.
In addition to the 30-foot stone sculpture, which depicts King, arms folded, staring across the Tidal Basin toward the Jefferson Memorial, the $120 million monument features curved granite walls inscribed with 14 inspirational quotes from his speeches.
A formal dedication ceremony is scheduled for Sunday, the 48th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington and the "I Have a Dream" speech. The public got its first glimpse Monday, and the memorial will remain open through Thursday, when it closes in preparation for the weekend’s festivities.
The memorial will help cement King’s legacy in the minds of generations too young to remember the civil rights struggles as well as those who do.
Lida White remembers drinking from black-only water fountains as a child, and the rocky integration of her high school, T.C. Williams in Alexandria, Va., which was made famous by the film “Remember The Titans.”
Monday, her 4-year-old grandson scurried about nearby as the 58-year-old sat on a bench and marveled at the placid feel of the space.
“To pay tribute to someone of his stature, I couldn’t think of anything better,” she said.
“Who is this a statue of?” White asked her grandson, Jayden. “Dr. Martin Luther King,” the boy replied, tugging on a baseball cap with Elmo, the Sesame Street character, on it.
“He knows the struggle,” White said.
The memorial was a struggle of its own. Members of King’s Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity first proposed the idea in 1984 and the site was approved in 1999. The memorial’s foundation has raised more than $114 million from public and private sources toward the $120 million project cost.
The memorial's planners, led by Houston attorney Harry Johnson, were criticized for hiring Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin to craft the statue and Chinese stone masons to help build it. A couple of protesters handed out leaflets Monday questioning why Americans were not picked for those roles. Johnson has said Lei was simply the best person for the job.
His granite depiction of King is carved out of the "stone of hope," a piece that is separated forward from two pieces of the "mountain of despair" that frame the entrance to the memorial plaza. The line is taken from the “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered a stone’s throw away at the Lincoln Memorial.
Ideal weather greeted the monument's first visitors, who came from near and far. Phil and Betty Ciampi flew down from Sea Cliff, N.Y., to make sure they were in the first group to see the memorial -- and avoid the weekend’s big crowds. As they waited in line Monday, workmen assembled scaffolding on an adjacent field for Sunday’s dedication.
“It's not about black or white; it's about being Americans,” said Phil Ciampi, who is white. "That's what he stood for."
The admirers were not just American. Rolf Erik Smith, 54, said he remembered King visiting his hometown of Oslo, Norway, when he was a boy. He said King's role in the U.S. civil rights battles garnered considerable attention there.
In town for vacation, Smith read about the early opening of the memorial and was thrilled he could get in before Sunday's formalities.
When told that King was the first non-president to be honored on the Mall, Smith said, "That tells me he was a great man. And he probably could have been president if he had not been killed."
Michael Berry, 57, of Washington, was among the several hundred people who lined up on Independence Avenue Monday morning before the gates opened. Arriving two hours early, Berry claimed the third place in line, clutching a pencil-on-paper likeness of King that he had drawn.
“Young folks will come down here and ask, ‘Who was Martin Luther King? What was he about?’” Berry said. “Just like they ask about Abraham Lincoln.”
For some, those questions aren't easy to answer. Cornell Williams, 67, said he finds it hard to describe his upbringing in Jim Crow-era South Carolina to his grandson.
"I can explain it to him, but he wouldn't be able to relate to it," Williams said. "He has never seen, experienced or even dreamed of anything like that."
Some hailed the multiethnic, multinational crowd at the memorial as the embodiment of the united society King once envisioned.
“He got what he wanted," said Connie Woodford, 52, of Fort Washington, Md.
But Hixson, who marched with King in Chicago and was moved to a life of political activism by his 1968 assassination, said she's not quite ready to declare the dream fulfilled. "Racism is still here, alive and well," she said.
But that doesn't diminish King's achievements or his right to be honored alongside presidents, she said.
"He probably moved more people and changed more systems than presidents often do. His message was one for everyone."
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