circumstances of the death or the motive of the killer: Why these people were killed and who they were killed by."
"In the end," Bullard continued, "we established three criteria for including people on the memorial. One was that they were killed because of their own nonviolent civil rights activism. Typically, these were men and women like Vernon Dahmer, a black businessman in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, who offered to pay the poll tax for anyone who couldn't afford the voting feehe was killed when his home was firebombed-or Viola Liuzzo, a white housewife and mother from Detroit who was shot by Klansmen for driving freedom marchers back to Selma, Alabama, from Montgomery. "Our second criterion was: People who were killed by agitators trying to stir up opposition to the movement or throw some obstacle in its path. These tend to be the lesser-known victims-for example, Virgil Ware, a 13-year-old Birmingham boy who was shot while riding on the handlebars of his brother's bicycle by white teenagers coming back from a segregationist rally; or Ben Chester White, a caretaker in Natchez, Mississippi, who was shot by Klansmen who wanted to divert attention from a civil rights march; or the four young girls-Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley-who were killed by the bomb that exploded in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, which had been a center for civil rights meetings. "The third criterion was: People whose death created momentum for the movement-whose death was used by civil rights groups as a tool to show the nation the conditions that Southern blacks lived under and the injustices they suffered. The death of Emmett Till, for instance-a 14-year-old boy killed for speaking to a white woman in Mississippi-was the first death that brought wide support from outside the South. Or Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was shot by Alabama state troopers for trying to protect his mother and his grandfather from a trooper attack on voting rights marchers. His death changed the entire course of the movement. It inspired the Selma-to-Montgomery march and eventually led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act." But finding the names wasn't easy. "A big problem was that newspapers in the South didn't cover these deaths," Bullard said. "My best source turned out to be the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, a group that does research and education on issues of poverty and civil rights. One of its categories was 'Violence and Intimidation.' The cardboard cartons containing those files had been stored in the basement, under a Korean grocery store-a place with a lot of dripping water. I spent a week in that basement and would come out at the end of the day looking like a coal miner. But 1 found names that hadn't turned up anywhere else, and one name led to another-people like Clarence Triggs, a bricklayer who was shot by the roadside for having attended meetings sponsored by the Congress of Racial
Equality, or Bruce Klunder, a white minister who tried to block the construction of a segregated school in Cleveland, Ten nessee." After much debate, 40 names were chosen. "The message that we try to convey," Bullard said, "is simply: 'This memorial represents the sacrifices of ordinary people during the civil rights movement. Here are some of those people.' " The Civil Rights Memorial was designed to serve as the entrance plaza for the Southern Poverty Law Center's new headquarters, a small building with a handsome interplay of angles and glass. The memorial has two components, both of black Canadian granite. The first part is a 2.75-meter-high wall, on the face of which are carved the words: ... until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream -Martin Luther King, Jr. Water spills down the wall at waterfall speed. Although the passage from the Prophet Amos as paraphrased by King actually begins with "We will not be satisfied," Lin told me that she started where she did because the word "until" catches the second purpose of the monument. "Unlike the Vietnam Memorial, which covers a specific period of time that's over," she said, "I wanted the Civil Rights Memorial to deal not only with the past but with the future-with how far we still have to go in a continuing struggle." The second part of the memorial, resting on an asymmetrical pedestal nearby, is a circular tabletop, 3.5 meters in diameter. Around its perimeter, incised in the stone, somewhat in the manner of a sundial, are 53 brief entries, chronologically arranged. Twenty-ope of them report landmark events in the movement: 13 Nov. 1956 Supreme Court bans segregated seating on Montgomery buses 30 Sep. 1962 Riots erupt when James Meredith, a black student, enrolls at Ole Miss 28 Aug. 1963 250,000 Americans for civil rights
march on Washington
20 Jun. 1964 Freedom summer brings 1,000 young civil rights volunteers to Mississippi
7 May 1955 Rev. George Lee. Killed for leading voter registration drive. Belzoni, MS 21 Jun. 1964 James Chaney. Andrew Goodman.