The sculpture, which looks as if some arbitrary guy is holding his hand out to check for rain, was created in the 1980s by then-80-year-old Selma Burke, originally of Mooresville and ostensibly the creator of the Roosevelt image featured on the dime. The MLK statue, and I am being very kind here, sort of, kind of looks like Martin Luther King . . . but not really — although, strangely enough, it’s a dead ringer for a guy I knew in my hometown named Hazel Willis. Seriously.
The Marshall Park statue once inspired an unsuccessful effort to replace the head of the full-body sculpture, which, on top of its other distinctions, was named “World’s Worst Martin Luther King Statue” in a book by Jerry Bledsoe, North Carolina Curiosities.
