Would slain civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. have approved of the monument to him unveiled last week on Washington DC’s National Mall? The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, designed and sculpted by an unpaid Chinese artist using Chinese materials and assembled with the aid of unpaid stonemasons who were flown in specifically for the job “to bring glory to the Chinese people” and to work for “national honor.”
With millions of Americans unemployed, underemployed or jobless and not counted in statistics, it seems like the monument to one of America’s most visible and well-known civil rights activists would be just the kind of project American elected officials would clamor to have Americans do. But Edward Jackson Jr, executive architect behind the monument, told reporters that Americans were unqualified to do the job. “Not only did we need an artist, we needed someone with the means and methods of putting those large stones together,” Jackson told Washington Post. “We don’t do this in America. We don’t handle stones of this size.”
But some American workers have called the move to outsource the sculpting and assembly job to China as a political move having nothing to do with the qualifications of American stonemasons and artists. Ed Dwight, an African American sculptor, was reportedly told by the backers of the MLK Memorial that they were hoping that choosing a Chinese artist would persuade the Chinese government to give them upwards of $25 million to reach their fundraising goal. Speaking to The Telegraph, Dwight said that King would be “turning over in his grave” if he knew that his monument was made in a communist country.