Nation acts to enshrine a dream

WASHINGTON -- Forty-three years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and challenged his countrymen to live up to the nation's founding principles, the civil rights icon was granted a place yesterday among the pantheon of America's most revered historical figures.

In a poignant ceremony under leaden skies, President Bush, Bill Clinton, and a host of celebrities and veterans of the civil rights movement broke ground for a monument to King on the National Mall -- the first such honor for an African-American leader.

"Dr. King showed us that a life of conscience and purpose can lift up many souls," Bush said at the morning dedication, as much a celebration of King's life and work. "And on this ground a monument will rise that preserves his legacy for the ages."

The memorial's location -- between the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials -- "will unite the men who declared the promise of America and defended the promise of America with the man who redeemed the promise of America," Bush said.

The memorial also salutes the thousands of men and women who braved intimidation, violence, and even death to demand racial and economic equality in the United States during the 1950s and '60s. And like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial erected 24 years ago, the King site will sanctify the civil rights movement in the nation's annals, historians and veterans of the movement said yesterday.

"It is an honor for the movement itself as well as King," said John Dittmer , a history professor at DePauw University in Indiana and author of "Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi." Without ordinary people behind King, he said, "there wouldn't be any monument to Martin Luther King and we would never have heard of him. He himself would have said that. The movement made King -- King did not make the movement."

The privately-funded, $100 million memorial, approved by then-president Clinton a decade ago, is expected to be finished by 2008. In addition to a likeness of King, the site will include an artistic design of King's renowned "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered from the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in August 1963. The speech has become King's signature moment; five years later, an assassin shot and killed him in Memphis. He was 39 years old.

The memorial, described as a "landscape experience," will reflect the arc of King's short life, according to the memorial foundation's website. Visitors will be able to walk from the "mountain of despair" to the "stone of hope ," representing the metaphorical concepts King spoke of so eloquently in his most famous speech. Passages from his sermons and speeches will be etched on a wall beneath a cascading waterfall.

The memorial site "places him in the line of succession of those men that provided the foundation of the country," Ron Walters , a political science professor at the University of Maryland who attended yesterday's event, said in an interview. "The civil rights movement was one of the founding fathers, making the Constitution applicable to all citizens. This really legitimizes that status for King and the civil rights movement itself."

Clinton put it simply yesterday: "It belongs here."

Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the only African-American in the Senate, related to the crowd what he would tell his young daughters if asked to explain why a memorial to King belonged amid towering shrines to America's historic figures.

"King Jr. was not a president of the United States -- at no time in his life did he hold public office," Obama said. "He was not a hero of foreign wars. He never had much money, and while he lived he was reviled at least as much as he was celebrated. And yet, lead a nation he did.

"Through words he gave voice to the voiceless," Obama continued. "Through deeds he gave courage to the faint of heart. By dint of vision and determination, and most of all faith in the redeeming power of love, he endured humiliation of arrest, the loneliness of a prison cell, the constant threats to his life, until he finally inspired a nation to transform itself, and begin to live up to the meaning of its creed."

The ceremonies were especially stirring for some of the aging foot soldiers of the movement, men and women who fought segregation with bus boycotts, lunch counter sit-ins, and countless protest marches across the South. Despite being jailed and brutalized, they undertook nonviolent tactics to help secure the passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. Several of them -- including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young, the former UN ambassador and mayor of Atlanta, both of whom were with King the day he died -- wept during the ceremony.

Representative John Lewis, who, as a young activist working with King in 1965, was nearly beaten to death during a march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., recalled hearing King's voice on the radio for the first time at age 15. "I felt like he was speaking directly to me: 'John Lewis, you can do it,' " recalled Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia, who also spoke at the 1963 rally.

As dignitaries with shovels -- including King's children and celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, poet Maya Angelou , and former Celtics star Bill Walton -- began the symbolic gesture of turning over the dirt where the memorial will be, an emotional Young said the movement's work is still not finished.

Leaning on Jackson, he urged the crowd: "Let's go back to our communities and turn the dirt."

Indeed, the monument will hold significance beyond one man, according to Haynes Johnson, a journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Selma civil rights demonstrations in 1966.

In an e-mail interview, Johnson said, "The fact a King memorial will forever stand in the vicinity of the Lincoln Memorial and the marble monuments to Washington, Jefferson, FDR, and the Capitol Building will be a permanent reminder of the civil rights struggle, the abomination of slavery, and the 100-year age of segregation that ended with the civil rights movement King led."

Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.