The Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial, to be dedicated Sunday, is the first monument to a black leader on the National Mall, a landscape devoted to American cultural and political iconography.
In Philadelphia, there is no such memorial, to King or any other black leader, in Center City.
No African Americans have been favored with a place in the shadow of City Hall, which is nearly ringed by immense statuary of commercial, legal, and manufacturing moguls; generals from the Union Army; and a U.S. president.
In fact, until the All Wars Memorial to Colored Soldiers and Sailors was moved to the Parkway in 1994 from its hideaway in Fairmount Park, there was no prominent public art in Center City alluding to black life at all. Emancipation Proclamation Fountain by Gerd Utescher, installed in 1965, sits deep in a stairwell leading to the 15th Street SEPTA concourse, obscured by overgrown foliage and virtually invisible to passersby – as if to prove the point.