Friday, December 14, 2012




Must not summarize MLK

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar endorsed a plan Tuesday to remove a disputed inscription from the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, rather than cut into the granite to replace it with a fuller quotation.

Salazar said he had reached an agreement with King's family, the group that built the memorial and the National Park Service to remove a paraphrase from King's "Drum Major" speech by carving grooves over the lettering to match existing scratch marks in the sculpture. Memorial sculptor Lei Yixin recommended removing the inscription this way to avoid harming the monument's structural integrity.

Critics including poet Maya Angelou complained after the memorial opened in 2011 that the paraphrased quotation took King's words out of context, making him sound arrogant. The paraphrase reads: "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness."

The full quotation was taken from a 1968 sermon about two months before King was assassinated. It reads: "Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter."

Source


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The "paraphrase" does not do justice to the quote, and should not be presented as the quote.

It's also historically inaccurate to present it as a quote. "Quotes" must be exact. If they had put "HE was a drum major for peace, justice, and righteousness," that would be fine - but don't put the WRONG words dully spoken into the man's mouth.

Bird of Paradise said...

MLK Jr was a communists agent he said some nasty things the liberal revionists text books will never tell you

Anonymous said...

He was also a drum major, (see: dupe) for the communists who financed and controlled him, ala Nelson Mandela and the ANC. The only difference being, they didn't supply Mandela with White women.

Anonymous said...

They could have used the quote like below using elipses and brackets to insert the word and for clarity.

"I was a drum major for justice. ... peace. ...[and] righteousness."

Go Away Bird said...

What this liberal history book wont tell you about MLK Contact the Council of Conservative Citizens