Photo: Fred Klonsky.
We had breakfast with my long lost cousin Rita this morning.
Rita is Jeff’s mom. And Jeff is the reason we are in Washington, DC this weekend. He got married to Robert.
Breakfast was at the old historic Willard Hotel across the street from the White House.
And as we said our good-byes to cousin Rita, Anne and I walked across the National Mall heading for the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Monument.
Past the soccer game on one half of the ellipse. Past the American football game being played on the other half. Past the kite flying in front of the Washington Monument. It is closed for earthquake repairs. Past the mobs of people who are searching for the random cherry blossom that has bloomed.
Most of the blossoms are running late.
The National Mall is full of war memorials. There are new ones to World War II and Korea. And Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Monument is the only peace memorial.
It is he only monument to a Black man on the National Mall in a city that a Black man helped first design.
Washington DC was among the first cities in America to have a majority Black population.
But no longer.
In 2011 the Black population fell below 50% for the first time in a hundred years.
“Maybe now we’ll get the vote,” one resident told me.
“This makes me feel melancholy,” Anne said to me after a few moments among the huge crowds of people gathered at the Memorial.
“Me too. I feel sad,” I said.
I find it hard to judge public art and public spaces using the usual aesthetic criteria.
Instead I try to get a sense of how the people feel about it. The looks on their faces. Their behaviors. Do they like it?
After all, it’s their space.
Why were both of us feeling sad? Maybe it was the lack of any historical context.
There is no sense of the Movement. A memorial to a great man, but nothing about a great Movement.
It is right that there is a monument for Dr. King on the National Mall.
But even on a beautiful, sunny, cherry blossom-blooming weekend in Washington, it made us feel sad.
Fred Klonsky 
This article by Fred tells us just who we are. There is only one “Peace Memorial” in the capitol and it is to a civil rights person who was Black. We are really now a warlike, belligerent imperialistic country. We are not getting better, we are becoming worse and more warlike as time goes on in our hegemony of the world and its resources and people. The Christians say “Walk with Jesus.” What does that have to do with what we do? I am an athiest who went to 12 years of religeous schools. I know the bible. Very few live the New Testament which is about peace and love. Hypocrites, most of them. The more fundamentalist the worse the hypocrisy is, so it appears to be.
I don’t think of the King Memorial as a peace memorial so much as a tribute to him as an individual much like all of the monuments dedicated to presidents on the mall. I am not inspired by the King memorial, but I am moved when standing on the spot on the steps of the Lincoln memorial where King gave his stirring speech to the masses on the mall. The place is marked. Many walk right past and even over it.