“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.”
The quote above is from a speech Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave on Feb. 24, 1968, about a eulogy that might be given in the event of his death.
Maya Angelou is not pulling any punches about her gut reaction to a decision designers made to paraphrase the quote to make Dr. King’s words fit in the limited space available on the monument’s north side.
“He had no arrogance at all,” the U.S. Poet Laureate and award-winning author said of King. “He had a humility that comes from deep inside. The ‘if’ clause that is left out is salient. Leaving it out changes the meaning completely.”
The paraphrase “minimizes the man,” Angelou insists. “It makes him seem less than the humanitarian he was. … It makes him seem an egotist.”
“He would never have said that of himself,” she said referencing the drum major aspect of the quote. “He said ‘you’ might say it.”
She said the quote should be changed to put it in context.
Told the quote had to be paraphrased to fit the available space, she did not mince words: “Too bad.”
Ed Jackson, the African American executive architect of the memorial defended the paraphrasing of King’s quote. “We sincerely felt passionate that the man’s own eulogy should be expressed on the stone,” he said. “We said the least we could do was define who he was based on his perception of himself: ‘I was a drum major for this, this and this.’ ”
Jon Onye Lockard, another consultant from the University of Michigan, said Angelou’s critique should have come years before now.
“If there’s any comment about anything, it’s late,” he said, noting others also have recently criticized pieces of the memorial. “I think it’s rather small of folks to pick at things. … This has been going on for 14 years, and all of them have had plenty of time to add their thoughts and ideas.” –kathleen cross and terry shropshire
Read more at the Washington Post.
