Lincoln Memorial Centennial Day

The Lincoln Group of DC, with co-sponsorship by the National Park Service and The Lincoln Forum, is celebrating the Centennial of the Lincoln Memorial with a dramatic re-dedication. The dedication in 1922 was not without controversy. Eager for reconciliation between North and South, Chief Justice William Howard Taft and President Warren G. Harding emphasized, as does the Lincoln Memorial design, Lincoln’s role in reuniting the nation. Robert Lincoln joined them but did not speak. The only African American participant, Dr. Robert Moton of the Tuskegee Institute, had his speech sanitized in accordance with Jim Crow-era segregation sensibilities. But over the next 100 years, the Memorial increasingly became a symbol of civil rights as African American contralto Marian Anderson sang there in 1939, Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech there in 1963 (the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation), and Barack Obama featured it in his inauguration…