Photo by LaTur.

Add Maya Angelou to the list of people who aren’t big fans of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. The legendary poet is the latest to take umbrage to a heavily paraphrased quote which was etched into the side of the memorial:

Carved on the north face of the 30-foot-tall granite statue, the inscription reads: I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.

“The quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit,” Angelou, 83, said Tuesday. “He was anything but that. He was far too profound a man for that four-letter word to apply.

“He had no arrogance at all,” she said. “He had a humility that comes from deep inside. The ‘if’ clause that is left out is salient. Leaving it out changes the meaning completely.”

The paraphrase “minimizes the man,” she said. “It makes him seem less than the humanitarian he was. . . . It makes him seem an egotist.”

The drum major reference “wasn’t all that he was,” she said. “He would never have said that of himself. He said ‘you’ might say it.”

Angelou, who knows a thing or two about the power of words and was on the panel which selected the excerpts which are carved into the rocks around the memorial, also suggests that the infraction is so severe that it should be changed. (That doesn’t sound like it’s going to happen, of course.)

Hey, at least it doesn’t make the good Reverend look myopic or little.