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When she did, a few weeks later, she brought an unusual-looking model: an asymmetrical black granite disk that would be 11 1/2 ft. in diameter at the top but only 20 in. across its base, an object that from a distance would appear to be floating in air. It would be 2 1/2 ft. high and have water flowing evenly and slowly across its flat surface. Underneath the water, etched in the stone and looking like points of a sundial, would be the words -- the names and the events -- that would tell the history of the civil rights era. They begin with 17 MAY 1954 SUPREME COURT OUTLAWS SCHOOL SEGREGATION IN BROWN VS. BOARD OF EDUCATION and end with 4 APR 1968 DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. ASSASSINATED MEMPHIS, TN (there will be 53 entries in all, with a conspicuous space before Brown and after King, suggesting the struggle didn't begin with the Brown decision or end with King's death). Anyone, she said -- be it someone who had lived through the events or a child who had not -- could move around the piece, putting his hand through the water to touch the words or simply seeing his reflection in the water itself. And by doing so, the person could either remember, or learn for the first time, the history recorded there.
"It's the kind of thing," Lin says, "that requires patience, awareness and added sensitivity. Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole. I wanted to put the truth down, just once. Placing it, just once." After all, she asks, "if you don't remember history accurately, how can you learn?"
But in asking that seemingly simple question, she raises a complex issue that will surely not be resolved until the memorial is dedicated, if then: How will the South in general, and Montgomery in particular, feel about this tribute to a painful time? And will Maya Lin find herself and her work surrounded by controversy once more?
"You put that memorial in front of your building, Bubba, and someone is bound to come over and tear it up," Dees was told earlier this year by Calvin Whitesell Sr., an attorney for the city during the Freedom Rides of 1961. "George Wallace once said to me," Whitesell recalls, "that the thing that always kept the South down was that the minute the South recovered from the Civil War, they started sending money to the North for bronze statues. We've got a bunch of them here, and I think you'll find that most people don't give a damn about memorials." He sees the real reason for the memorial this way: "A wonderful fund raiser for Morris. He came to Montgomery to do good, and he's done very well."
Dees has heard all this before, and contends that there are people in Montgomery who will never forgive him for successfully filing suit to integrate the city's YMCAs. And while he doesn't rule out the possibility of vandalism (a 1983 fire bombing forced the SPLC's move to its present location), he feels that anything like that would come from outside Montgomery. He feels that way primarily because he believes Montgomery has changed.