MISQUOTED

See the quote above, inscribed in the side of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, when it opened in Washington, D.C. in 2011?

One little problem: He didn’t really say it that way. One critic felt the rephrased quote makes King sound like an “arrogant twit.” So the quote was removed — at a cost estimated between $700,000 and $900,000.

The inscription came from a sermon that King delivered two months before he was assassinated in 1968. Speaking to the congregation of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, King critiqued what he called the egotistical “drum major instinct,” evoking the image of a showboat who leads a parade.

Imagining his own eulogy, King said he wanted to be remembered for a higher purpose.

“Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice,” King said. “Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.”

But that was distilled to the inscription on the north face of the memorial’s statue: “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.” It was designed to match an equally brief inscription on the south face: “Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.”

Dismay over the truncated version grew after the Washington Post ran an opinion piece drawing attention to the abridgement. Poet and author Maya Angelou said it made King sound like an “arrogant twit.”

The quote was removed in time for the 50th anniversary of King’s March on Washington in August 2013.

PHOTOS FROM NASA, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS AND WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Sources: The Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, Snopes, the Associated Press, NASA, National Park Service, ListVerse.com