Events
Located at the base of the Lincoln Memorial's steps, the Reflecting Pool area has been the site of many historic events, including:
- In 1939, singer Marian Anderson was denied permission to perform in Constitution Hall in Washington, because she was African American. An open air concert was arranged on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, with a crowd of over 75,000 people around the Reflecting Pool area.
- In 1963, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom used the area for its Civil Rights rally. It was there that Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered to a crowd of a quarter million people standing around (and in) the Reflecting Pool.
- In 2009, We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial was held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. An estimated 400,000 attendees watched from around the pool.
- In 2010, the restoration project began.
- As of 2012, the restoration project is done and the pool was reopened on August 31.
Read more about this topic: Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“All strange and terrible events are welcome,
But comforts we despise.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)