A son of Georgia, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. fought for equality.
Now, granite industry leaders in his home state are demanding equal bidding rights to provide the stone that will make up King's national memorial on the Mall in Washington.
Elberton, considered "The Granite Capital of the World," accounts for one-third of total granite monument production nationwide.
But stone for the King statue will come from China and be crafted by Chinese artist Lei Yixin.
Granite industry leaders in the United States want to know why.
"It should be a job that's done in America by Americans," said Thomas A. Robinson, executive vice president of the Elberton Granite Association. "In my opinion, it's a slap in the face to everything that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood for and worked for."
No one from the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Foundation, the campaign established to raise money for the project, has asked for a price quote from any of the association's members, which includes 135 companies in Northeast Georgia and employs 1,200 people, according to Robinson.
Robinson's discussed that decision with Georgia legislators.
Obviously, some of them are listening.
In a Wednesday morning House session, state Rep. Al Williams, D-Midway, urged his colleagues to sign a resolution calling for the memorial to be built out of Georgia granite. He specifically cited Elbert County and Stone Mountain as good granite sources.
Clint Button, a South Carolina sculptor and the U.S. Granite Industry liaison to "King is Ours," an online movement designed to protest the outsourcing of the project, said he was outraged when he discovered that a Chinese company and artist would produce the statue of King.
"About 45 quarries are less than two hours from Dr. King's home in Atlanta," Button said. "Not a single one has been approached about building the monument. They didn't even get a phone call."
Construction on the memorial is expected to begin in April, the 40th anniversary of King's assassination, and be completed in fall 2009.
The memorial will stand in a plaza adjacent to the Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial and between the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. A 30-foot sculpture of King will stand near the site where he gave his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963.
Using Elberton companies or quarries would boost the city's image and state's economy, said Anna Grant Jones, executive director of the Economic Development Authority of Elbert County, Elberton and Bowman.
"It would have been an extreme marketing tool for our industry to use," Jones said. "There was not even an American company considered, much less a Georgia company. Dr. King was from Georgia. Using Georgia granite would have been a great tribute to him."
At one time, the King Memorial Foundation said American companies would be able to provide 51 percent of the granite used in the overall memorial (which includes the statue), but granite industry leaders say that's not good enough.
The memorial, they said, should be 100 percent American.
"I'm fighting for the granite industry and this way of life," said Button, a sculptor whose family has been working in stone for 117 years.
As the granite industry protests, the memorial foundation has defended decisions to buy Chinese granite and hire a Chinese sculptor.
Harry E. Johnson, the foundation's president and chief executive, once estimated that half the stone would come from outside the United States, but now says at least 85 percent of the stone in the overall memorial will come from U.S. quarries.
"I can assure you that Georgia granite will be used in this project," Johnson said.
Only 10 to 15 percent of the stone - the rock used for a 30-foot tall statue of King - will come from China, he said.
The CEO, along with U.S. Reps. John Lewis, D-Atlanta, and Hank Johnson, D-Lithonia, toured Stone Mountain in July and surveyed granite quarries there, he said.
American companies will have a chance to bid on other aspects of the memorial, but the project simply has not gotten to that stage.
"I think they're putting the horse before the cart," Johnson said.
And the memorial foundation picked Lei because he's an expert granite sculptor with experience in projects of the same scale as the King statue, he added.
"There's not a lot of people out there that can do this work with a chisel," Johnson said.
"The bottom line is Dr. King's message that we should judge a person not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character," Johnson said. "Dr. King was an international figure."
As construction nears, granite industry workers and artists want to see more information on how the memorial foundation is spending the $10 million in matching funds appropriated by Congress in 2005.
"We're all calling for action," said Button, "This is a matter that needs to be taken up by the law."
Ninety percent of the $90 million raised so far came from private donors, such as General Motors and, most recently, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
The National Park Service requires that the memorial foundation collect at least $85.5 million for building and maintenance costs before the start of construction.
Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on 020308
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