"The signifier belongs to everybody": Deconstructing the MLK Plaza

There are very few cultural texts that enjoy universal admiration or receive unambiguous and univocal acclaim from a heterogeneous society; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. might be one such text. 

King is renown for his role in the civil rights movement, commitment to nonviolence, prophecies of radical justice, and martyrdom. The text of his life, words, and image is an immediately recognizable symbol of resistance to oppression.

However, as such a powerful text, King has become an irresistible attraction for institutional appropriation. Despite the strident social critique embodied in his life’s work, despite being extremely divisive and unpopular while alive, Dr. King-as-icon has been incorporated into the metanarrative of “liberty and justice for all,” a symbol of the greatness of the USA, the nation of freedom.

The University of Maine is one institution where this appropriation of King-as-text is visible. The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. & Corretta Scott King Memorial Plaza ostensibly honors King and his wife; text from their letters and public addresses are mounted in a space aesthetically reminiscent of the Capitol Mall. The signification of this plaza is fairly clear: the memory of Dr. King is to be honored, and we must remain vigilant for the cause of justice.

But if this memorial is conceived as a production rather than a product, a site not of stable meaning but of a text at work, what can it be read to say? The work of the text is “that radical work (which leaves nothing intact)”—dangerous work to engage in when the signification is such a potent cultural trope, but work that is always already in process.

The memorial’s texts are ‘sanitized’ and physically marginalized, on the periphery of a walkway; hard granite benches discourage loitering, accomplishing at once the ‘celebration’ and effacement of the texts. The ‘memorialization’ of Dr. King and his words imply that justice has already been accomplished, that it is a triumph to celebrate rather than a work in which to currently engage.

The selective gaps are telling, decontextualizing the words of a radical and divisive figure to render them palatable and inoffensive, a cause neither for reaction nor even observation. In the memorial you will find no mention of the Reverend, the struggle for African-American Civil Rights, or King’s death by assassination. Predicated on a general public knowledge of the subject, this serves to neutralize King, coopting him for a bland sentiment with no historical or material specificity.

The work of the text of the memorial is a reinforcement of complacency; we learn from a plaque that “University of Maine students, faculty and staff stand in opposition to violence, oppression, indifference and all forms of injustice in our society.” Rather than suggesting that individuals must daily take a stand against injustice by opposing institutionalized violence, oppression, and indifference, the memorial suggests that the institution itself is a guarantor of freedom, thus removing the responsibility for vigilance from the individual. The text of the memorial as a whole works to directly contravene a statement of Dr. King’s contained within it: “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”