Officials of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Foundation have encountered another bump on their long road to opening the $120 million memorial to the slain civil rights icon.
An American bricklayers union is appealing to the State Department to deny visas to a group of Chinese workers set to assemble the King sculpture on the National Mall.
Members of the Local 1 Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Union recently handed out pamphlets in front of the MLK Jr. Memorial Foundation offices at Judiciary Square, protesting the Chinese workers.
“It’s a monument that stands in America that pays homage to a great American man,” said Scott Garvin, president of BAC Union Local 1. “We have plenty of unemployed stonemasons who want to work on this.”
The union has appealed to the State Department to withhold visas from the approximately eight Chinese workers because they believe, with high unemployment in the U.S., Americans should be working on the memorial.
State Department spokesman Philip Crowley wouldn’t discuss specifics about the visas in question. “Some visa categories require the applicant to demonstrate through a labor certificate that no American workers are available. Other visa categories do not have that specific requirement,” he said.
Harry Johnson, president and CEO of the MLK Jr. National Memorial, said that 95 percent of the work on the memorial is being done by Americans.
The memorial originally was scheduled to open last spring, but there was a lengthy delay in 2009 as memorial officials dealt with National Park Service concerns over how to best secure the memorial from potential terrorism. A compromise was reached last October by agreeing to landscape concrete barriers in a way that was less obtrusive to the memorial.
Then the foundation had to deal with a controversy over the design planned by sculptor Lei Yixin of China. The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts thought the statue was “confrontational” and reminiscent of social realism political sculptures. Design changes were made, satisfying the commission.
Construction of the four-acre memorial site began last December and is nearly half completed. The memorial foundation has raised $107.1 million of the $120 million needed.
Construction slowed earlier this summer because of a shipment delay caused by the Greek economic crisis. The Greek government had agreed to ship the 159 sculpture pieces from China to the United States for free. The pieces
finally arrived in mid-August, enabling construction of the sculpture to begin in the fall.
