The Civil Rights Memorial is a memorial in Montgomery, Alabama to 40 people who died in the struggle for the equal and integrated treatment of all people, regardless of race, during the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The memorial is sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The names included belong to those who died between 1954 and 1968. Those dates were chosen because in 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in schools was unlawful and 1968 is the year of Martin Luther King's assassination. The monument was created by Maya Lin who created the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. The memorial was dedicated in 1989.
The concept of Maya Lin's design is based on the soothing and healing effect of water. It was inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr.'s paraphrase "... we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. ...", from the "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963. This passage in King's speech is a direct reference to Amos 5:24, as translated in the American Standard Version of the Bible. The memorial is a fountain in the form of a round stone inverted cone. A film of water flows over the base of the cone, which contains the 40 names included. It is possible to touch the smooth film of water and temporarily alter the surface film, which quickly returns to smoothness. As such, the memorial represents the aspirations of the American civil rights movement against racism.
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“Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man’s yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!”
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—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)
“The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“I hope there will be no effort to put up a shaft or any monument of that sort in memory of me or of the other women who have given themselves to our work. The best kind of a memorial would be a school where girls could be taught everything useful that would help them to earn an honorable livelihood; where they could learn to do anything they were capable of, just as boys can. I would like to have lived to see such a school as that in every great city of the United States.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)