Maya Lin, Memorial Designer Artist Maya Lin envisioned the Civil Rights Memorial as a contemplative area. (Cheung Ching Ming) When the Center decided in 1988 to build a memorial to honor victims of the Civil Rights Movement, board member Eddie Ashworth thought immediately of Maya Lin. Seven years earlier, when she was a 21-year-old senior at Yale, Lin was chosen in a national competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. That memorial had proven to be a place of healing, a place where, as one veteran described, "the living and dead could meet." As soon as the Center's board of directors approved the idea for a Civil Rights Memorial, Ashworth contacted Lin. "When we asked her if she would be interested in designing a memorial to Civil Rights Movement victims, she was surprised that one didn't already exist," he said. It was on a plane trip to Montgomery to visit the site of the proposed memorial that Lin got her inspiration. Reading through some research material, she came across the words "until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream," a paraphrase from the Book of Amos that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had used in his "I Have a Dream" speech and at the start of the bus boycott in Montgomery eight years earlier. "The minute I hit that quote I knew that the whole piece had to be about water," Lin said. "Suddenly the whole form took shape, and half an hour later I was in a restaurant in Montgomery with the people from the Center, sketching it on a paper napkin. "I realized that I wanted to create a time line: a chronological listing of the Movement's major events and its individual deaths, which together would show how people's lives influenced history and how their deaths made things better." Like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Civil Rights Memorial invites visitors to touch the engraved names. As Lin envisioned, the Memorial plaza is "a contemplative area — a place to remember the Civil Rights Movement, to honor those killed during the struggle, to appreciate how far the country has come in its quest for equality, and to consider how far it has to go." At the dedication of the Memorial, before the public was admitted into the plaza, the families of the slain civil rights victims gathered. As they touched the names of their loved ones, their tears fell into the flowing water. "I was surprised and moved when people started to cry," said Lin. "Emmett Till's mother was touching his name beneath the water and crying, and I realized her tears were becoming part of the Memorial." During the dedication ceremonies in 1989, shooting began for a documentary film on the work of Maya Lin. That film, A Strong Clear Vision, went on to trace the creation of several of Lin's commemorative pieces, and in 1995 it won an Academy Award for best feature-length documentary.