Maya Ying Lin

Writer's Almanac:

It’s the birthday of sculptor and architect Maya Ying Lin, born in Athens, Ohio (1959).

Lin founded her own studio in 1986, and has gone on to design several more installations, including a monument to the Civil Rights Movement in Montgomery, Alabama (1989). She began reading up on the movement and was shocked at how much had been left out of her childhood education. She knew she would incorporate water into the memorial when she read a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: “No, no, we are not satisfied and will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” She said, “What bothered me about going down thinking about the past in this one is that it’s not done. It’s not a closed timeline. It’s ongoing. What the Southern Poverty Law Center is struggling with is the ongoing, is the future. So I needed something to connect the past, which would be the history, which became the water table, with the talk about the future which is the quote … then the water pulls them together symbolically.”