Preliminary work to remove a disputed quote from the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial begins next week, the National Park Service said Friday.
Beginning Monday, the site will be prepped for repairs, with scaffolding going up. Sculptor Master Lei Yixin is expected the following week to begin the work.
The work is expected to be complete ahead of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington Aug. 28, according to NPS.
In December, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he reached an agreement with King's family, the group that built the memorial and the National Park Service to remove a paraphrase from King's "Drum Major" speech by carving grooves over the lettering to match existing marks in the sculpture, rather than cutting into the granite to replace it with a fuller quotation.
Yixin recommended removing the inscription that way to avoid compromising the monument's structural integrity.
Critics, including poet Maya Angelou, complained after the memorial opened in 2011 that the paraphrased quotation took King's words out of context, making him sound arrogant. The paraphrase reads: "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness."
The full quotation was taken from a 1968 sermon about two months before King was assassinated. It reads:
Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter."
Ed Jackson Jr., the memorial's executive architect, told the Associated Press that the lettering will be replaced with horizontal "movement lines" that are already part of the design to show the movement of the central "Stone of Hope" out of a "Mountain of Despair" behind it.
That design was inspired by a line from King's "I Have a Dream" speech: "Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope." That message is inscribed on the other side of the sculpture and will remain.
Cutting granite out of the sculpture and replacing it to make way for a longer quotation would have looked like a "patch job" forever, Jackson said. Removing the inscription retains the integrity of the artwork, he said.
The memorial will remain open during the work, though access to some areas will be affected, according to NPS.
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