A controversy of sorts has emerged over the planned Washington DC statue of Martin Luther King.  Apparently, some organization called the US Commission on Fine Arts, which has a role in the proceedings, feels that the model of the monument is too "confrontational."  Eugene Robinson has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post that sums things up nicely:

At issue is the statue that will stand as King’s official monument in
Washington. The arts commission, which rules on the aesthetics of such
memorials, has sent a letter to the Martin Luther King Jr. National
Memorial Project Foundation complaining that the depiction is "a
stiffly frontal image, static in pose, confrontational in character."

What they thought they were getting, commissioners wrote, was a
"dynamic" and "meditative" King. Leave aside for the moment the
question of how any sculptor is supposed to make someone look dynamic
and meditative at the same time. The point is that the arts commission,
for some reason, was not comfortable with the image of a stern-faced,
28-foot-tall black man who has his arms crossed.

 I am totally with Robinson on this:

Here’s what is really going on: It’s clear that some people would
prefer to remember King as some sort of paragon of forbearance who,
through suffering and martyrdom, shamed the nation into doing the right
thing. In truth, King was supremely impatient. He was a man of action
who used pressure, not shame, to change the nation. The Montgomery bus
boycott, to cite just one example, was less an act of passive
resistance than a campaign of economic warfare. Yes, he knew that
televised images of black people walking miles to work would help mold
opinion around the world. But he also knew that depriving the bus
companies of needed revenue would hit the Jim Crow system where it
really hurt.

     King was confrontational.  He had to be.  He was struggling against powerful political and historical forces.  In defiance he spoke truth to power, he demanded that right be done.  So why not remember him in all the glory of that struggle and defiance?

       In a way, King reminds me of Mencius, who also bravely spoke truth to power.  While perhaps Mencius would not have pursued the same political tactics as King, he would have recognized the moral purpose of the civil rights struggle.  Mencius, like King was quite willing to confront power holders with their shortcomings, as in this passage (Lau translation):

Mencius went to P’ing Lu.  "Would you or would you not," said he to the governor, "dismiss a lancer who has failed three times in one day to report for duty?"

"I would not wait for the third time."

"But you yourself have failed to report for duty many times.  In years of famine, close on a thousand of your people  suffered, the old and the young being abandoned  in the gutter, the able-bodied scattered in all directions."

"It was not within my power to do anything about this."

"Supposing a man were entrusted with the care of cattle and sheep.  Surely he ought to seek  pasturage and fodder for the animals.  If he found that this cold not be done, should he return his charge to the owner or should he stand by and watch the animals die?"

"In this I am at fault."… (IIB.4)

     Mencius gets right up in the face of the governor.  When the latter tries to shirk his responsibilities, Mencius comes at him again from another discursive angle.  He was determined to make the political powers-that-be do the right thing, and he did, in this case at least.   There is a certain defiance and confrontation in Mencius however much it might have been expressed in distinct cultural practices of another time and place.  And that is rather like Martin Luther King.

       Yes to the "confrontational" King statue!