The Civil Rights Memorial, 1989

In nineteen eighty-eight, the Southern Poverty Law Center commissioned Maya Lin, then twenty-eight years old, to design a memorial. Seven years before, as a Yale undergraduate, she had submitted a class project: the design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. That design had been selected in a national competition.

Lin's memorial for civil rights, dedicated November fifth, nineteen eighty-nine, in downtown Montgomery, drew from a single source. Martin Luther King, in the speech he gave from the Lincoln Memorial in August nineteen sixty-three, had quoted the Book of Amos: we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Lin designed a circular table of black granite with water flowing constantly across its surface. Engraved in the stone, radiating outward from the center like the hands of a clock, are brief chronological entries spanning the civil rights movement from nineteen fifty-four through nineteen sixty-eight, and the names of forty men, women, and children who were killed during those years. Behind the table, a curved black granite wall carries the Amos quotation in full. Water flows down that wall as well.

Viola Liuzzo is on the table. So are Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and thirty-four others. The table records the documented dead of a specific fourteen-year span.

The memorial is open around the clock, every day of the year. It is at four hundred Washington Avenue, across the street from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Admission is free.