THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, January 12, 1995 TAG: 9501120394
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Marc Tibbs
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
``If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don't want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long . . .
I'd like somebody to mention on that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., February 1968
The spirit of this excerpt from King's sermon ``The Drum Major Instinct'' could well serve as a lesson to the organizers of the long-proposed memorial at Brambleton Avenue and Church Street in Norfolk.
Just two months before his assassination, almost prophetically, King laid out in the sermon just how he wanted to be remembered.
He talked about the urge in all of us to be out front - to be ``drum majors'' - and how that tendency, left unbridled, can lead to all manner of vanity and self-delusion.
Organizers of Norfolk's King Monument should reread that sermon.
The committee for the King monument, now in its 19th year, says it has collected $300,000 of the $450,000 in donations and pledges needed to build the 150-foot spire in King's memory. The spire idea actually is cast in the memory of the late and honorable Judge Joe Jordan, who envisioned it as a tribute to King at a spot that once was the hub of Norfolk's black community.
On the eve of the anniversary of King's birth, it's time again to dust off the collection plate.
``We've been really low-profile, because we were trying to call on people one-on-one,'' said Mary Redd, executive director of the Urban League, which first lent its services to the committee last year.
``We wanted the whole community to participate, (and) we'd like the churches on Sunday (King's birthday) to lift the plate,'' she explained. ``That would go a long way toward getting everybody involved.''
Redd said the wooden thermometer at Brambleton and Church that symbolizes pledged and collected contributions and that has been updated only once since the last King holiday will be painted again in the next few days. A symbolic ground breaking at the site also is being scheduled.
Contributions and pledges over the past year have come from corporations, groups of employees and private individuals.
But thousands of others in the area are fed up with what has amounted to a fiasco in King's memory. This is the second committee to undertake the task of raising funds. The first committee disbanded amid rumors of malfeasance and a futile attempt at raising the monument.
And as well-respected as Judge Jordan is, an aluminum monument still seems to some like a misguided tribute.
King himself probably would have agreed.
``If you want to say 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 the other shallow things will not matter.''
Nothing could be more shallow than a cold, inaccessible monument that's been a generation in the making. by CNB