Maya Lin's low granite fountain, the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, lies just ahead of you. Water moves across the stone in a steady, healing sheet — the soothing effect that Lin intended — and the names of 41 people are inscribed here as martyrs who were killed in the civil rights movement. Those names represent people killed between 1955 and 1968, a span the memorial marks as the era when legalized segregation was prominent.
The dates on this site sit against larger national moments noted here: the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education and 1968, the year of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Maya Lin’s design was dedicated in 1989 and draws directly from King’s 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech — the passage inscribed here: "...we will not be satisfied "until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream... — itself a direct paraphrase of Amos 5:24 as translated in the American Standard Version.
Listen to the water, read the names, and notice the ripple crossing the polished granite that carries their memory.