A large Martin Luther King Jr memorial in Denver’s City park was vandalized, and police are trying to determine if racial bias was involved.
Several pieces of the marble and bronze I Have a Dream memorial were stolen sometime Tuesday. The missing pieces include a bronze torch and angel, as well as a bronze panel that depicted Black military veterans, the Denver Post reported.
Vern Howard, chair of the Dr Martin Luther King Jr Colorado holiday commission, told the newspaper that a community member informed him of the vandalism Wednesday morning.
“You can steal. You can take. You can pull. You can hate. You can do everything that you believe necessary to detour the message of Dr King and Dr Martin Luther King Jr Colorado holiday commission,” Howard said. “We’re going to continue to march, to honor and to work toward freedom, toward justice, toward the end of racism, toward the end of hatred and the end of discrimination.”
Artist Ed Dwight created the memorial in 2002. It features a bronze statue of King and smaller statues of Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass.
The Denver police department’s bias-motivated crime unit is investigating.
The memorial is one of numerous historical Black monuments recently reported stolen or vandalized in the US. Last month, more than 100 plaques were stolen from one of Los Angeles’s first Black cemeteries. A statue honoring Jackie Robinson was also stolen from a Little League baseball field in Kansas. A plaque recognizing the racist history of a California beach town was stolen at the end of January.