King statue brings battery of complaints

Prince C. at American Black, a new weblog that is coming along very well, has an entry about one of those situations that push all kinds of hot buttons. Some of my fellow Tarheels are in a tizzy over a work of art. The New York Times been down there.

It was supposed to bring them together. A bronze statue of Martin Luther King in the North Carolina town of Rocky Mount to honour a little-known but much cherished connection between a big moment in history and a small southern US town.

For on November 27 1962, a full seven months before he stood in Lincoln's shadow during the "March on Washington" and addressed the country, King delivered, in Rocky Mount's high school gym, one of the first renditions of his "I have a dream" speech.

Some people here remember it. And they want to make sure their children do not forget it. So a sculptor was found to build a statue to celebrate the man and his call for racial harmony.

But then everything started to go wrong. Residents in the black area where the statue was placed complained that it didn't look like him. The face wasn't quite right, the stance was haughty, the expression aloof. One even thought the pen he was carrying looked like an extra finger.

"I couldn't believe it," said 71-year-old Samuel Gray. "That's not Dr King. There's no likeness, none."

The statue does resemble Dr. King, in my opinion.

But, I never saw him in person. Someone who did disagrees.

Elbert Lee, a 71-year-old Baptist preacher, walked with Dr. King and talked with Dr. King. "And that ain't Dr. King," he said. "The lips, the eyes, the head, the mustache, the cheeks. It don't favor him."

Well, maybe. But, I am still skeptical about there being something wrong with the appearance of the statue. Works by different artists tend to be styled according to their way of doing things, but that does not mean the works don't represent their subjects.

Another complaint about the statue, which the Guardian reported, bothers me more.

Then they found out the sculptor was white. To the statue's detractors race explained the artistic mistakes. "We need an artist who can relate," one resident, Kimberle Evans, told the New York Times.

To supporters of the statue, the racial point explained why others would disparage it so readily. But, either way, the work of art meant something to almost everyone. For the town council that meant trouble. Views on how to rectify the situation diverged, from the drastic (getting the sculptor to cut the head off and replace it with a better likeness or do the whole thing again) to the problematic (finding a black sculptor to do another).

Article Author: Mac Diva

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