To hear him tell it, the story goes like this: At a 1988 NAACP meeting, prominent civil rights lawyer Morris Dees spoke about a recent courtroom victory over the Ku Klux Klan. To begin his talk he read out the names of several activists killed by the Klan during the 1950s and '60s, just as he had done in his closing statement at the trial. After his speech a boy in the audience approached and asked Dees about the people he had just named: "Who is this Medgar Evers?" the boy wanted to know.

Or, to hear him tell it another way, the idea to build a monument to the Civil Rights struggle in America came about after his young daughter returned from a tough day at her Montgomery, Alabama elementary school. Her classmates just couldn't understand black people, she told her father. Whether the actual roots of the idea lie in one tale, the other or both, the story that Dees's monument itself tells is wholly singular in its vision, and for years that vision has comprised the most visible public recounting of the fight for racial equality in America. But in December of 2005, close to thirty-eight years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., a group led by Dr. King's former fraternity brothers will break ground on a new monument and a new national story about the struggle for racial equality.

Monuments have the peculiar quality of being frozen in the past yet always being active reminders of the present. By their very nature they tend to define the beginnings and ends of the social movements they commemorate, even while their express purpose is to keep the ideals of those movements immediate and present in the minds of the generations that follow. What's more is that much of the time, the people who helped craft the movement commemorated have little or nothing to do with the presentation of that movement through monument. Monuments tell stories - literally set them in stone - in the most public way possible. The historical narratives that they relate represent the nation's official version of its past. It is for this reason that monuments - whether they are religiously significant symbols in a Kansas courtroom, presentations of personal grandeur in a Baghdad square or towers and reflecting pools in Lower Manhattan - carry such great political weight.

The national story of the American civil rights movement as told through monument is about to undergo a significant facelift. The form in which it currently exists - as a statue on the grounds of a prominent civil rights law firm - and the new form it will soon take on - as an integrated set of memorials on the National Mall - both extend the story of the struggle for civil rights beyond the usual limits of that story. But the new monument goes significantly farther in addressing the problems of racial inequality as systemic issues that have affected the country as a whole. Further, it pays homage to important actors who have traditionally received little public notoriety. Yet the story of social change that the Mall monument will present is decidedly mixed in its vision, and its tenor is every bit as ingrained with the political ideologies of its backers as Dees's monument in Montgomery is with his.

Morris Dees has the mind of a lawyer and the heart of a salesman, and he sells one thing: hate crimes. Always something of a sensationalist, he tells his own story with the self-reliant flare of a real-life Horatio Alger. Born to tenant farmers in Mount Meigs, Alabama, Dees worked his way off the farm and into the University of Alabama by the mid 50's. There he founded his own mail order company and made his first million while still in his twenties. Selling birthday cakes and cookbooks directly to the nation's homemakers, he completed what is literally a rags to riches story of entrepreneurship. Dees - drawn to the struggle for civil rights after reading the autobiography of Clarence Darrow - co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971 with Joseph Levin and Julia Bond. His work at the Center has gained Dees wide public notoriety and acclaim, so much so that NBC made a movie about him in 1991. Yet Dees also has his detractors, who claim that his tactics at the law firm are no different from the unabashed salesmanship of the direct mail business he founded at the University of Alabama. "I never saw any examples of him doing something because he had a moral belief. He was simply doing things to see what he could get out of them," Courtney Mullin, a co-worker of Dees, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1994. Later that year the Montgomery Advertiser published a series of articles portraying Dees as a relentless and hyperbolic self-promoter who has largely exaggerated the threat that hate groups pose to American citizens.

In 1989 Dees commissioned Maya Lin to design a tribute to civil rights activists on the grounds of his Center. The resultant monument is constructed out of black granite, directly echoing Lin's widely acclaimed piece commemorating the soldiers lost in the Vietnam War. Also like Lin's Vietnam memorial, the Center's monument displays the names of people who died during a turbulent period of American history. These 40 names, interspersed with important dates and events of the civil rights era, spiral out from the center of the large granite table like spokes on a bike wheel, while a thin film of water washes over them. Behind the table stands a wall made of the same black granite and inscribed with words Martin Luther King, Jr. borrowed from the Bible for his "I have a dream" speech: "... Until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."

While the formal vocabulary of the monument draws heavily on Lin's legacy, its rhetorical slant seems to have sprung from the head of Dees alone. The problem of racial inequality as described by his monument is one of isolated, violent episodes, perpetrated by murderous individuals and existing almost exclusively in the South. This focus on death - and more specifically on organized murder by hate groups - defines a very specific frame through which we are to assess both the meaning and causes of racial inequality. The border which Dees's monument draws does not leave room for open discussion of class struggle, systemic problems with the American democracy or historical exploitation of black labor. It does not question the actions or moral imperatives of the American government and its operational framework. And it does not weigh in on such difficult issues as affirmative action, de facto economic segregation, and the academic achievement gap. In short, it tells the kind of a story that makes the work pursued by Dees's Center the central ingredient in the ongoing struggle for racial equality.

To further accentuate the role of the Center, Dees has edited the set of violent, race-related deaths that occurred during the time period traced out by his monument. Dees himself estimates that 18 people were killed in racially-motivated violence during 1964, though his monument lists only five. And no one would question the assertion that more than 40 people died in race-related violence during the time period considered by the monument. The subset of individuals represented on Dees's monument has two important unifying themes. First, an overwhelming number of the murders commemorated on the monument occurred in the South: Of the 40 individuals on the list, thirty-two were killed in either Mississippi or Alabama, and only one was killed above the Mason-Dixon Line (in Cleveland, Ohio). In the 1967 uprising in Detroit, forty-three people lost their lives, yet not one of them appears on Dees's monument. Second, the individuals on Dees's monument are only victims - or martyrs - not complex political actors. A name conspicuously absent from the monument is that of Malcolm X, who was murdered in February of 1965, and a good number of the individuals listed (for instance, the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing of 1963) have particularly tragic tales, but were not themselves figures central to the organized attempt to gain greater civil rights for African Americans in this country.

The monument's own location and the location of milestone events interspersed among the murders noted on the monument also center the story of racial inequality in the former states of the Confederacy. The Center goes out of its way to make visitors aware of the monument?s proximity to two significant symbols: the White House of the Confederacy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The milestones mentioned among the murders heighten the viewer's awareness of just where he is standing as he looks at the monument. The events give visitors the impression that they are at the geographical center of the civil rights struggle, that all important events happened just steps from the SPLC. From Rosa Parks' famous bus ride to the Greensborough sit-ins to Alabama Governor George Wallace's headline-grabbing barricade of the University's front doors, all but a handful of these events received major media coverage during their time period as examples of Southern intolerance and rebellion.

Finally, the time period of these events and the way in which Dees has categorized them are exactly those traditionally - and short-sightedly - assigned to the movement. The dates and phases engraved on the monument seem taken almost word for word from a high school textbook: The Movement started in 1954 when the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board and Rosa Parks wouldn't move to the back of the bus. It went through a period of early struggles, became a broader "movement of the people," and then degenerated during the late 60's amidst a haze of confrontation and rage. In reality, an organized movement for equality existed far outside both of those book ends, from the Niagara Conference and the founding of the NAACP in the early 1900's to the organizing efforts of youth groups which continue to this day.

Not until ten years after Dees had erected his memorial did the United States government approve the site and concept for a National monument to the civil rights movement, even though members of the fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha had seriously proposed the idea some twenty years before. In 1996 Congress delegated responsibility for the monument project to the fraternity, which chose to construct a tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. When finished, the site will span four acres along the edge of the Tidal Basin on the National Mall, forming a visual link between the Jefferson and Lincoln monuments. A large statue of King, roughly hewn from the "stone of hope" will tower over the center of the site, with his "spiritual presence," in the form of quotations from his speeches and sermons, suffusing the area. A granite wall will ring the four acre plot, and streams of water will cascade down the wall, across the site, and into the Potomac River. Plaques and enclaves will dot the entire site, commemorating other civil rights activist including Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, and possibly Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker. Finally, several commemorative plaques will be left blank in recognition of the ongoing nature of the struggle.

The major historical advisor to the team who designed the monument was Clayborne Carson, noted Africana historian at Stanford University. As editor of King's papers, Carson brings extensive knowledge to the project. Yet Carson's scholarship extends well beyond King. Active in the civil rights struggle from his days as an undergraduate at UCLA, Carson's knowledge of the movement is first hand. His book In Struggle: SNCC and the black awakening of the 1960's summarizes Carson's understanding of the movement: "SNCC's organizing efforts suggested a framework for understanding the black struggle of the 1960's not as an operation initiated and directed by leaders such as Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, but as a mass movement that produced its own leaders and ideas."

In one of those rare instances in which a voice from the movement is involved in its memorialization, that voice has gone largely unnoticed by the popular press. The significance of Ella Baker or Fannie Lou Hamer's presence at the site has given way to rehashing of traditional tales about King, the Birmingham bombing victims and Rosa Parks. The monument's inclusion of Hamer and Baker, and the way in which their inclusion frames the story of social change, is a radical step. The way Carson's monument tells the story, the struggle for civil rights did not spring fully-formed from the head of a handful of charismatic individuals with whom we are all familiar, but rather it was pervasive, deeply-rooted in history, and from the ground up. Yet Carson's story is not wholly consistent in its presentation of the struggle. King remains the dominant centerpiece of the monument, as his words and image virtually overwhelm the area. The site's designers, a firm called ROMA Design Group, have structured the site in such a way as to further distract from Carson's central theme. They sought to create a "spiritual" and "emotionally evocative" space where a sculptural representation of King depicts the man not as a complex political actor, but "as an integral part of the Stone of Hope," as if he "embodies the stone itself." The monument quite literally tries to make King a part of the earth. The quotations from King's sermons that will ring the entire four acre plot accentuate the focus on King's earthy spirituality. The resultant de-politicization of King's message and the omission of his more politically controversial views on such topics as the Vietnam War (which critically inform his views on racial oppression), soften the visitor's experience and come at the cost of accurate story-telling. King's radical critiques of the American government (which he once called the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world") are left unmentioned, while his message of spiritually-based individual change is brought to the fore.

As such, this monument clearly holds up King as a model of the American dream, and not as a person oppressed by it. According to the foundation, the monument is conceived of as engaging the surrounding landscapes and monuments, incorporating the cherry trees of the Tidal Basin and serving as a link between the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials. They mean for it to capture three recurring themes of Dr. King's life: justice, democracy, and hope. The memorial is "placed directly in line with the larger democratic ideals that form the context for King's words and deeds." The large statue of King at the center of the monument holds a pen pointing at the Jefferson memorial, meant to invoke the man's democratic writings. The materials of the monument also point toward the actors of the civil rights struggle as examples of the American Dream: "Hewn stones with smooth surfaces ... are used throughout the memorial to display the different ways King and other civil rights activists acted out their faith that the democratic ideals of the founding fathers (symbolized by the Jefferson Memorial) can be realized through struggle and sacrifice." Like Dees's monument, the monument on the Mall only considers the civil rights movement as the logical result of a nation momentarily betraying its credo. It ignores the fact that many of our founding fathers (including, most notoriously, Thomas Jefferson) thought slave ownership perfectly in line with the democratic values upon which they based this country's legal code.

In the end, though, what do we really expect from our monuments? Is it realistic to think that they will represent an objective recounting of events? Or even a recounting of events told from a diverse set of vantage points? Certainly not. As a nation, we tend to commemorate people, not changes. We are obsessed with the individual, and it follows that our monuments would be as well. What's more is that we tend to do our memorializing not through any centralized, democratic planning process, but through the vision and agitation of impresarios and interest groups. In this free market of memorialization, it is only logical that certain singular visions will outcompete the rest of the field. The FTC is not looking out for the interests of the little guy in this business of commemoration. Trust-busting is an impossibility and monopolies an inevitability. But maybe that's OK. Maybe there's nothing we can or should do about it - singular visions create monuments that are bolder, more artistically striking and coherent than the bland, compromise-heavy memorials produced by more democratic types of planning. Maybe the only step forward, then, is increased awareness and transparency. In the same way that Democratic and Republic politicians are inextricably tied to the (D)'s and (R)'s that follow their names, our monuments might carry short footnotes of their own, naming their political backers and funding sources. Such a step would increase the power of monuments to communicate ideas. It would allow viewers to associate the monument's rhetoric with a given political group, thus setting up a means for dialogue between viewer and creator. An unfootnoted monument on the other hand, one that just lands upon us as an unattributed product of objective history, tells a story that leaves no author to question.
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