WASHINGTON, D.C. —
The National Park Service announced plans Friday to remove an inscription from the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and replace it with a full quotation from the civil rights leader — a move the memorial project's architect said would "destroy" the monument.
Critics, including the poet Maya Angelou, had said the paraphrase didn't accurately reflect King's words. It reads, "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness."
Angelou had said the shortened phrase made King sound like an "arrogant twit." She had served on a panel of historians to select inscriptions for the memorial before they were hand-carved into stone, but she did not attend meetings about the inscriptions, memorial officials have said.
Fixing it will likely involve cutting into the monument several inches around the inscription to remove a block of granite and replacing it with another piece for engraving. Officials said it's unclear how much the work may cost. The park service may seek private donations to fund the project.
Removing the inscription now will amount to "defacing" the memorial or "scarring it for life" because any new granite added to the memorial would be a noticeably different color, said Ed Jackson Jr., the executive architect of the $120 million memorial project.
"There is no way you can match the existing stone and color," he said. "It will continue to age differently, even if you went to the same quarry."
He compared it to the Washington Monument, which has a visible line where the color of the white stone changes because construction of the memorial was halted for years during the Civil War.
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