Lincoln Memorial Dedicated; Audience Segregated
An audience of 50,000 people attended the dedication ceremony of the Lincoln Memorial on this day. Incredibly, despite the fact that President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, the audience for the ceremony was racially segregated.
Washington, D.C., was essentially a southern city in the 1920s, and segregation was firmly entrenched in the city and throughout the south.
Many important events have occurred at the Lincoln Memorial over the years. Perhaps the most famous was the concert by Marian Anderson, before a crowd of 75,000, on April 9, 1939. She had originally tried to book Constitution Hall, but the owners, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), dominated by southern segregationists, turned her down because she was an African American. Her rejection provoked a political uproar and, among other things, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt immediately resigned from the DAR. Her agent then quietly asked Harold Ickes, who as Secretary of the Interior controlled the Lincoln Memorial. Ickes checked with President Franklin D. Roosevelt who immediately granted permission.
Anderson’s concert drew such an enormous crowd, including an estimated one million people listening over the radio, because of the international political climate. With the world apparently headed for war, Anderson’s concert was a statement in support of racial equality –perhaps the first major national event in that regard– and a rejection of the racism of Nazi Germany.
Read About the Dedication Ceremony: http://www.nps.gov/linc/historyculture/stories.htm
Watch a documentary on the dedication: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76nAcSbdLI8
Learn about the Lincoln Memorial: Julie Murray, Lincoln Memorial (2017)
Visit the Lincoln Memorial
Read about the concert: Ray Arsenault, The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, The Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert that Awakened America (2010)
See a short film clip of the historic concert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAONYTMf2pk
Learn more about Marian Anderson: http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/anderson/