Lincoln Memorial. Located on the west end of the Mall in
Washington, D.C., the Lincoln Memorial features Daniel Chester French's statue of a seated Abraham
Lincoln in a building designed by Henry Bacon and modeled after a classical Greek temple. Authorized by Congress in 1911 and built by the Lincoln Memorial Commission, it stresses Lincoln's role as savior of the Union and the importance of sectional reconciliation between North and
South. The speakers who dedicated the memorial on 30 May 1922, including President Warren G.
Harding, made scant mention of Lincoln's role as the “Great Emancipator” of African American slaves.
In 1939, however, the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) helped to reshape Lincoln's memory by turning the memorial into a locus for
civil rights activity. That year, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes gave the NAACP permission to sponsor an Easter concert by Marian
Anderson, an African American singer, after the Daughters of the American Revolution had denied her the use of Washington's Constitution Hall on account of her race. Widely attended and publicized, Anderson's appearance made the memorial a popular site for future civil rights rallies and protests. In August 1963, the memorial became the focal point of the March on Washington, attended by hundreds of thousands of people demanding passage of what became the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. It served as the backdrop that afternoon for Dr. Martin Luther
King's memorable
I Have a Dream speech.
Bibliography
Scott A. Sandage , A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Memory, 1939–1963, Journal of American History 80 (June 1993): 135–67.
Merrill D. Peterson , Lincoln in American Memory, 1994.
G. Kurt Piehler
