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"It's like a divorce," he says, sitting in his second-floor office from which can be seen, in the distance, the state capitol at whose steps the historic 1965 march from Selma ended and where the Confederate flag still flies. "For a long time you don't want to talk about it. But after a while the pain is gone; you're able to live with it, discuss it. I think the city is coming around to that now. Montgomery fought the movement at every turn, but I think it can be a very positive, cathartic thing for the city to face up to its past."
One Montgomery resident who agrees with him is Robert Beasley, a black, 75- year-old retired high school principal whose only connection to the memorial is his fear -- his fear that without it "much of what happened -- the sacrifices that were made -- will be forgotten, unless we leave it in stone for generations to see."
As Ken Upchurch, 33, a native of Montgomery whose firm is building the memorial, puts it, "If its purpose is to educate people, it's already worked with me. It's made me aware of a period that I might never have learned about."
And Lin herself, he says, has helped him understand a design that he initially viewed as a contractor's nightmare. Last April, Upchurch finally asked her what he had been meaning to ask for quite some time. He wanted to know how she had come up with it all, curious about the relation of the vast water wall to the low-lying table that will be in front of it, surrounded by a plaza of white granite.
She spoke of aesthetic quality, of "dissimilar elements maintaining equilibrium." She spoke of shapes echoing one another, of objects and concepts coexisting in harmony. "Things can look different," she said softly, "but still be the same."
She might have said people, but didn't. Ken Upchurch understood.
For two weeks now, the memorial has been in place behind the white plywood walls on Washington Avenue. But Lin won't really know if what she envisioned truly works until someone, someone like Calvin Whitesell Sr., can experience it for himself.