Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool - Events

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:

    “I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire—thinner than the paper on which it is printed—then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along the primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one’s way to where the country is.”
    —John Ashbery (b. 1927)

    “Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)