Word: splc
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Dates: during 1989-1989
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Maya Lin was living on New York City's Lower East Side when she received a call from a man in Louisiana in late February 1988. Edward Ashworth, a member of the board of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, said he was sorry to disturb her at home but hoped she would seriously consider the reason for his call: he wanted to know if she would be open to the idea of creating a memorial to those who had given their lives in the struggle for civil rights. Since she had designed the much celebrated Viet...
...excited but apprehensive. The material she had been sent from the law center included videotapes of the PBS series Eyes on the Prize, the book that complemented it and a short documentary on the Ku Klux Klan, one of the groups whose activities the SPLC monitors. Before receiving all this, Lin knew very little about the civil rights movement. She wasn't even born when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in 1955, the arrest that led not only to a yearlong bus boycott but also to the "official" beginning...
What she showed Morris Dees, the SPLC's executive director, and Cohen that day, roughly sketched on a paper napkin, was a slightly curved black granite wall, 8 3/4 ft. high and 39 ft. long, that would bear part of the King passage. Above it, on what would be the upper plaza, water from a small pool would flow gently down the wall, gently enough that one could easily read the words. To the right of the wall would be a curved set of stairs...
Dees has heard all this before, and contends that there are people in Montgomery who will never forgive him for successfully filing suit to integrate the city's YMCAs. And while he doesn't rule out the possibility of vandalism (a 1983 fire bombing forced the SPLC's move to its present location), he feels that anything like that would come from outside Montgomery. He feels that way primarily because he believes Montgomery has changed...