The Capitol Dome

Department of the Interior, on Easter Sunday 1939 the steps of the Lincoln Memorial were the site of an open-air concert by Marian Anderson for an integrated audience of 75,000. It was the first black mass action that evoked a positive response in the country at large and became part of the collective Ameri- can past. In August 1963, over 200,000 persons assembled on the hill around the Washington Monument and moved to the Lincoln Memorial. e March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom became the most remembered protest in the history of the United States. It was an aim of its organizers that the demonstration would be acceptable to the general public. It was part of what had been local actions throughout the south that had combined "the rhetoric of Christian expectations and American democracy with tactics of Gandhi's nonviolent direct action." e use of the Lincoln Memorial for the 1963 March recog- nized the value of that site for the civil rights movement since the 1939 concert by Marian Anderson. e issue of reconcili- ation between the North and South was paramount when the Memorial was conceived and built. Before 1939 and even since, efforts by blacks to modify that emphasis by invoking Lincoln as Emancipator were largely unsuccessful. Now, for the first time since Reconstruction, the principle of racial justice could find widespread support by whites as well as blacks ere was a civil rights bill awaiting action in Congress in 1963, during the presidency of John Kennedy. ere would indeed be a peaceful march without any note of civil disobedi- ence. Huge numbers came. For example, as many as 450 bus- loads arrived from New York City. e success of this March in terms of numbers and the inspirational speech of Martin Luther King, Jr. set the tone for many future protests. Congress eventually passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; President Lyndon Johnson signed July 2, 1964. Martin Luther King went on to expand his ministry to the larger area of rights of the poor and opposition to the Vietnam War before his assassination on April 4, 1968. In recognition of the broader range of American political life, in 1986 he became the first of his race commemorated by a bust (fig. 9) in the hallowed Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol and a memorial (fig. 10) placed in 2012 in the sacred space immediately adja- cent to the Lincoln Memorial. MARK N. OZER is a former professor of neurology at the Georgetown University Medical School. His interest in his- tory, geography, and urban development has resulted in the publication of a series of books on Washington, D.C. He has previously written articles on the depictions of Native Americans in nineteenth-century art in the U.S. Capitol and Benjamin Henry Latrobe's role in rebuilding Washington, D.C. after the War of 1812. THE CAPITOL DOME 33 Fig. 9. Martin Luther King, Jr., bronze bust by John Wilson, 1986, Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Fig. 10. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, white granite by Lei Yixin, 2011, West Potomac Park, Washington, D.C. NAT IONAL PARK SERVICE ARCHI T EC T OF T HE C API TOL

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