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When she flew south to Montgomery, the "cradle of the Confederacy," in May 1988, Lin was excited but apprehensive. The material she had been sent from the law center included videotapes of the PBS series Eyes on the Prize, the book that complemented it and a short documentary on the Ku Klux Klan, one of the groups whose activities the SPLC monitors. Before receiving all this, Lin knew very little about the civil rights movement. She wasn't even born when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in 1955, the arrest that led not only to a yearlong bus boycott but also to the "official" beginning of the nonviolent movement. The first thing she remembered, and not from the time it happened, was an image of Governor George Wallace looming in a doorway at the University of Alabama, unwilling to let any black student enter. The fact that she was neither a participant in the movement nor a well-versed student of it did not prevent her, as it did not prevent her with Viet Nam, from having an intuitive sense of what was needed.
At lunch that day, all she could think about (and all Richard Cohen, the legal director of the center, could recall her talking about) was water. On the flight down, she was particularly struck by a line from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, the line, partly borrowed from the Bible, that said, "We will not be satisfied until 'justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.' " It occurred to her that water would be an ideal element for a hot climate, that its calm, soothing quality and quiet, constant sound would be perfect for the "contemplative area" she wanted to create in front of the center, a place that would have all the tranquillity of a Japanese garden, a place "to appreciate how far the country has come in its quest for equality and to consider how far it has to go."
What she showed Morris Dees, the SPLC's executive director, and Cohen that day, roughly sketched on a paper napkin, was a slightly curved black granite wall, 8 3/4 ft. high and 39 ft. long, that would bear part of the King passage. Above it, on what would be the upper plaza, water from a small pool would flow gently down the wall, gently enough that one could easily read the words. To the right of the wall would be a curved set of stairs.
This, she said, was "the universal" element, and she would return with "the specific" to balance it.