MLK memorial quote is 'not what Dad said'

January 17, 2012 at 1:34AM

WASHINGTON - Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has ordered a correction to a badly mangled quotation from Martin Luther King Jr. inscribed in granite on the memorial to the slain civil rights leader. Salazar has told the National Park Service to consult with the memorial foundation and the King family and to report back within 30 days with a plan to fix the carved excerpt that turned a modest and mellifluous phrase into a prideful boast.

Memorial architect Edward Jackson said the foundation has already come up with a proposal for alternative wording. But he said it's impossible to carve the quotation in its entirety in the yard-thick granite without destroying the entire monument.

The paraphrase on the 30-foot-tall granite statue comes from a 1968 sermon King delivered two months before his death. He spoke of the "drum major instinct" as a self-centered view of the world that he denounced. Imagining his eulogy, King used the conditional tense: "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." But after the architect and the sculptor thought the stone would look better with fewer words, a shortened version was put on -- "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness." Poet Maya Angelou said that it made King sound like "an arrogant twit," and Martin Luther King III told CNN, "That was not what Dad said."

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