Memorial honoring MLK to receive funding boost - USATODAY.com: WASHINGTON — Alfred C. Bailey, too, had a dream.
About 20 years ago, the retired engineer and his Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity brothers sat around a dining room table, talking about the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Memorials to King had been erected around the country, but there was nothing in Washington, D.C., where he made his famous 'I have a dream' speech about a future of racial harmony on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the summer of 1963.
'We knew he deserved it, so we dedicated ourselves to getting it done,' said Bailey, 82, of Silver Spring, Md.
Today, 21 years after the first federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr., the dream King's fraternity set in motion is almost realized.
The Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation Inc., has raised $72.9 million in mostly private donations to fund a memorial on the National Mall and will announce Monday that corporate donors will be contributing at least $2 million.
The foundation is asking churches over the next year to sponsor a collection for the memorial, which is expected to cost $100 million.
Scheduled for completion in late 2008, the memorial will be located on a four-acre site along the Tidal Basin, surrounded by memorials to Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
It will be the first memorial on the mall for a non-president and African American.
'I don't have any question that we're on track,' said Harry Johnson, the foundation president.
The memorial will include waterfalls, a wall of quotes, and boulders, including one with a carving of King's image and words.
Bailey helped pick the design. He was among the more than 200,000 people who heard King's 1963 speech during the March on Washington, and he was inspired.
Bailey remembers, as a young soldier in 1943, having to travel through small Southern towns with the curtains drawn on his train car because the residents 'didn't want to see black people.' And 10 years later, he and his wife slept in their car when they ran out of gas after the local gas station closed and no hotel would take them.
'That's why I could feel so good when Martin spoke about freedom for all because I had experienced segregation,' Bailey said. The memorial, he said, 'will be so worthwhile to many generations to come.'
