Statues

Martin Luther King speaks to Occupy Wall Street - -




-- and a new community funded film project on what Dr. King and Mahatma Gandhi called "soul force" and what Martin Luther King called upon people to be, i.e. "maladjusted" --




In the second video, I was struck by the similarity between the Selma marchers as they walked across the bridge in the '60's, and the brave Brooklyn bridge marchers on October 1st.  And, of course, how appropriately Dr. King's words apply to all of the recent demonstrations across the country in the first video. 

I was captured, too, in the 2nd video, by the cinematographer's visual elucidation of the bronze Kelly Ingram Park statues (I've never seen in person), and that bring the Civil Rights confrontation John Lewis describes so dramatically to life again before our present-day eyes. 

Here is what Boston Globe reporter, Patricia Harris, wrote on July 23, 2008 about Montgomery, Alabama (and Boston, Massachusetts,) and regarding the erection of those statues:

A city with guts

It’s a very classy act for Birmingham, Ala., to rename its airport after the civil right leader, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, as reported in the Globe on July 17. But then, when I’ve visited my friend Verna, I’ve been impressed with her city’s willingness to confront its segregationist past rather than sweep it under the rug. In Kelly Ingram Park, a leafy space downtown on 16th Street North, there are several bronze statues commemorating the struggle for civil rights—including a powerful image of a Birmingham policeman and his dog face-to-face with a civil rights demonstrator. Images of the police and fire fighters attacking demonstrators with dogs and firehoses in May 1963 were broadcast across the nation. By the end of the year, Birmingham had wiped its segregation ordinances from the books. Moreover, some historians say, the national outrage helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Such historical markers show real civic courage. I wonder if Boston will ever erect a statue of Ted Landsmark being beaten with an American flag on City Hall Plaza?

More on Ted Landsmark here, along with an image of what that statue would look like in Boston.

Whereupon I found myself wondering what a serious statue of Occupy would look like.  Maybe one day in the future when we have fully crossed the bridge. 

Would it be a statue of the Brooklyn Bridge confrontation on October 1st?  Demonstrators carrying away the wounded Scott Olsen?  The Berkeley students resolutely standing together as they were beaten by police officers?  The UC group?  The Occupy Atlanta foreclosure?  The small group of NY women being penned in and pepper sprayed at close range?  A resonating announcement early on?  A ghost of Walt Whitman standing stubbornly with his?  A photographer being shot out of a tree in Denver?  Would it be a statue suggesting the tens of thousands of people who finished that march - that was interrupted on that October 1st -- over a month and a half later in the approach of winter?

And whatever type of statue - what accomplishment/s would it mark - besides the physical crossing of a bridge?

Would this statue ring as true for people as the statues in Kelly Ingram Park?  Or would it feel like listening to the empty words of politicians who opposed Martin Luther King during his time, and would oppose him today (although they sing him praises on the national holiday)?

Would the statue be a representation of a real accomplishment?  Or would the statue be an emblem of the hollowing out London activist George Bardat discussed - poaching and cooptation?  A take-over of Occupy Wall Street by Wall Street and the slick spin of its multi-media advertising conglomerates?