ROCKY MOUNT (North Carolina): It was supposed to bring them together. A bronze statue of Martin Luther King in the North Carolina town of Rocky Mount to honour a little-known but much cherished connection between a big moment in history and a small southern US town.

For on Nov 27, 1962, a full seven months before he stood in Lincoln’s shadow during the “March on Washington” and addressed the country, King delivered, in Rocky Mount’s high school gym, one of the first renditions of his “I have a dream” speech.

Some people here remember it. And they want to make sure their children do not forget it. So a sculptor was found to build a statue to celebrate the man and his call for racial harmony.

But then everything started to go wrong. Residents in the black area where the statue was placed complained that it didn’t look like him. The face wasn’t quite right, the stance was haughty, the expression aloof. One even thought the pen he was carrying looked like an extra finger.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said 71-year-old Samuel Gray. “That’s not Dr King. There’s no likeness, none.”

Then they found out the sculptor was white. To the statue’s detractors race explained the artistic mistakes. “We need an artist who can relate,” one resident, Kimberle Evans, told the New York Times.

To supporters of the statue, the racial point explained why others would disparage it so readily. But, either way, the work of art meant something to almost everyone. For the town council that meant trouble. Views on how to rectify the situation diverged, from the drastic (getting the sculptor to cut the head off and replace it with a better likeness or do the whole thing again) to the problematic (finding a black sculptor to do another).

Letters to the local paper ranged from demands it should be left as it was, to complaints that it should never have been erected in the first place. And while almost everybody has had an opinion, nobody has been keen to stump up the money it will cost to find a solution.

The sculptor, Eirk Blome, is philosophical, if piqued by the response. “With any piece of artwork there are going to be some people who don’t like it. But this is not personal and it’s not about the sculpture. It’s about feelings that are understandable, about historical resentments built up over time.”

You don’t have to spend long in Rocky Mount to see what he means. The town may have been one of the first venues to host the dream speech, but it looks as though it may one of the last to actually experience the dream itself. Race divides the town as clearly as its railroad tracks. Rocky Mount may have only 56,000 residents but when it comes to living in racially segregated areas they all seem to know their place.

And by either poor luck or ill judgment the statue was built at a sensitive time in the town’s demographic history. Thanks to the white flight to the suburbs, black people are now in the majority. City elections returned the first black majority to the city council last week, prompting the accusation that the dispute arose because of the white mayor trying to ingratiate himself with the local black leadership, which in turn is flexing its muscles.

But then there are others who walk up to the centrepiece of the 11-hectare park and come away disappointed. King stands staring with his arms folded and a pen in hand. Paving slabs spiral their way up to him, each inscribed with a part of his dream speech or the address he gave the night before he was assassinated (“I’ve been to the mountain top ... and I’ve seen the promised land”).—dpa