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A Monument to Democracy

The Mall as Public Space

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech in 1963

The Mall is the stage for public celebrations and civic gatherings and demonstrations. The Lincoln Memorial is historically associated with civil rights demonstrations, dating back to Marian Anderson's concert in 1939, and including the March on Washington in 1963 and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, as documented in the National Park Service's 1999 Cultural Landscape Report on the Lincoln Memorial Grounds.

The Mall's great cross-axis is today "a monument to democracy... a unique national space, an embodiment of our democratic ideals and achievements ... an indispensable, nationally significant cultural resource..." (Report of the Joint Task Force on Memorials, January 2000, published by the National Capital Planning Commission).

In the twentieth century the Constitution was amended to extend civil rights to all Americans - women and blacks - and so too the Mall has only in our own day come to be the people's place, as the preeminent forum for public celebrations and demonstrations of those rights.

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