During her senior year she entered a nationwide competition sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund to create a design for a monument honoring those who had served and died in that war. The memorial, dedicated in Washington, D.C., on Veterans Day 1982, aroused a great deal of controversy, reflecting the lack of resolution of the national conflicts over the war. Lin sought anonymity by returning to academia, beginning graduate studies in architecture at Harvard University. In early 1983 she left Harvard to work for a Boston architect, but in 1986 she completed a master's in architecture at Yale. In 1988 Lin agreed to design a monument for the civil rights movement on behalf of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Water flows gently over both parts of the memorial.
The Civil Rights Memorial was dedicated in Montgomery, Alabama, in November 1989.