W E B Dubois Cofounder

Behind King Memorial, One Fraternity's Long Battle

The thousands of visitors at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington this week will reflect on the controversial likeness of the man, his legacy and the significance of the first nonpresident — and first African-American — immortalized on the National Mall.

But most of them probably won't know who built it.

They will find little about the pivotal role played by the African-American fraternity to which King belonged, Alpha Phi Alpha. The organization is more than a century old but largely unknown to nonblacks, and had no experience with a project of this magnitude.

"This is far-fetched," says Alpha Phi Alpha president Herman "Skip" Mason Jr. "I mean, come on."

The idea was born in 1983 at the dining table of the late Alpha brother George Sealy. Over the next three decades, the fraternity battled government commissions over location and design, raised about $112 million in a single six-year span and generally led a public campaign to justify why King deserved a place in the most exclusive section of the National Mall, alongside shrines to Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Alpha Phi Alpha won't be at all lost in the week's worth of festivities to dedicate the monument. Several of King's top lieutenants from the 1960s also are Alphas, and they are scheduled to be honored at numerous events. They include civil rights icons such as former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young and the Revs. Joseph Lowery and C.T. Vivian.

While the fraternity itself may hold little name recognition in mainstream America, many of its members are major power brokers in their professions and used their influence to raise money, push legislation through Congress, and design and build the project. They include several members of Congress and executives at General Motors, Toyota and McDonald's — including the fast-food chain's president and chief operating officer, Don Thompson.

Mason said they helped clear a number of obstacles along the way — and there were plenty. The project was denied its first choice of location, until Alphas in Congress "applied political pressure," he says, to reverse the decision and allow the memorial at the Tidal Basin. They calmed anger over the selection of Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin, against demands that an African-American be given the job. And when fundraising was at a trickle in the early 2000s (with only about $2 million collected solely from fraternity members), they devised a strategy that extracted commitments from many of the top U.S. corporations. When their building permit was held up, they helped secure a $12.5 million letter of credit from Wal-Mart to break ground.

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