The new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall is formally located at 1964 Independence Ave. in a nod to the year the Civil Right's Act, for which the black American hero fought, was signed into law.
The massive nine-metre stone statue of Dr. King, which opens to the public on Tuesday, is a bit closer to the Lincoln Memorial than to the Jefferson Memorial. This is fitting, considering the philosophical proximity between the "I have a dream" leader and the father of the Emancipation Proclamation. Despite Jefferson's "all men are created equal" spiel, the author of the Declaration of Independence owned plenty of slaves.
Still, it's hard to imagine a more inspiring democratic trinity, and the linearly linked monuments erected to these giants form a kind of axis of good, reminding Americans just why the United States is so exceptional.
They need it. Americans are suffering from a rare case of self-doubt. Yet, they are split six ways to Sunday about how to get out of their Carteresque morass.
So what does a president do in these circumstances?
If you're Barack Obama, you head out on a three-day bus tour of the rural Midwest, about the least economically traumatized region of the country.
No one can accuse this White House of having a good sense of geography.
The unemployment rates in Iowa and Minnesota stand at 6 per cent and 6.7 per cent, respectively. In Illinois, the jobless rate hovers around the national average of 9.1 per cent. But the pain is not exactly evenly distributed between the gritty parts of Mr. Obama's Chicago (which he did not visit) and bucolic Whiteside County (which he did).
Whiteside, where the President dropped in on a cattle-judging contest, is 92.2 per cent white. Iowa's Dubuque County, where he gave a speech on a farm worthy of a Norman Rockwell portrait, is 94 per cent white.
"We don't know what the strategy is," Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters cracked this week at a jobs fair in Detroit sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus. "We don't know why on this trip that he's [on]in the United States now, he's not in any black community."
Whatever the "strategy," the White House now has reams of film footage for campaign ads featuring Mr. Obama amid the cows, barns and county fairs of America – in other words, among stuff white people like.
The President's overall approval rating has been boosted by overwhelming support from black Americans. Only one in three white voters approves of his performance. Hence, they're getting all the attention.
"We don't put pressure on the President because y'all love the President," Ms. Waters told the audience in Detroit (a city that's 82 per cent black). "We're supportive of the President, but we're all getting tired."
The first black president seems to go out of his way to avoid being a champion of the race he checked off as his own on his 2010 census form.
In decades hence, historians and biographers will delve into Mr. Obama's complicated personality and personal history to explain his cool cucumber shtick. But his failure to show that he feels the pain of black America is a missed opportunity for him, and the country.
Black Americans have suffered disproportionately from the Great Recession. The net worth of the median black household shrank by half, to a dismal $5,677, between 2005 and 2009. The median white household, while down 16 per cent, is now 20 times wealthier.
Indeed, on almost every data point, blacks as a group are losing ground relative to whites, while inequality among blacks increases.
Life expectancy in Mississippi's Holmes County, which is 83 per cent black, is 15 years lower than in the white and Asian enclave of Virginia's Fairfax County, outside Washington.
The rate of HIV infection has stabilized everywhere but in the black community. Gay black males between 13 and 29 accounted for more than half of new infections among gay men in that age group in 2009.
In Arkansas, where courts still supervise school desegregation, one judge's May 19 ruling summed up the frustration: "Few if any of the participants in this case have any clue how to effectively educate underprivileged black children."
Mr. Obama is set to give a speech at the dedication of the King Memorial. It's likely to be a good one. But by his actions, he has shown he's no Martin Luther King – or even a Lyndon Johnson, for that matter.
Konrad Yakabuski