How the National Mall Became a Center of American Protest: Photos

While it is now known as the site of some of the most iconic marches and demonstrations in American history, Washington, D.C.’s National Mall of the 1800s was quite different.

“In the 19th century, it had basically been a parkland with forests and gardens,” says Kirk Savage, a professor emeritus of the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. People rode carriages around the beloved if unkempt space and visited to see the plethora of trees.

Even so, lawmakers and other community leaders believed the area should more closely resemble architect Pierre L’Enfant’s original vision, which called for a “grand avenue” connecting the White House and the U.S. Capitol. A Senate commission extensively studied what would make the green space stand out and collected their findings in a 1902 report.

“They looked at places like Berlin, Vienna and Paris. Paris was really the big model for everyone [because] Paris was the elite cultural capital of the world then,” Savage says. “They had this great dream of making this big formal landscape garden out of it, as opposed to the informal one that had been in the 19th century.”

Their vision did not include carving out a zone for protests and free speech, however. The National Mall we know today, which began to take shape in the 1930s, was “created to be this elite sort of cultural capital where people would ride their carriages and you might see sheep on the meadows of the mall,” Savage says. “But then it started to turn into a protest site.”

During the 19th century, Americans occasionally flocked to the Capitol grounds for large gatherings, though they weren’t allowed to assemble there. “There was no real spot and no big place to have a protest until the mall was created,” Savage says.

From historic civil rights demonstrations to the creation of the modern-day environmental movement in the United States, here are five historic events that happened at the National Mall.

When renowned opera singer Marian Anderson opened her 1939 Easter Concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with a rousing rendition of “America (My Country, ‘Tis of Thee)” before a diverse crowd of 75,000 people, it was a moment of both protest and the Roosevelt administration’s implicit endorsement of the urgent need for desegregation. The National Mall was not the originally intended venue for the internationally known operatic star’s performance. When she and the event’s original sponsors at Howard University were prohibited from utilizing the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Constitution Hall, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes stepped into gear, quickly organizing a public, open-air concert instead.

In addition to taking advantage of the mall’s considerable size, the Lincoln Memorial had tremendous symbolic value. Even before the Marian Anderson concert, the Lincoln Memorial attracted Black organizations and groups, who would host events there or meet and have their photograph taken in front of the monument, Savage notes. “So it had already been very much adopted by the Black community, [who] turn[ed] it into this very specific kind of protest or political space,” he says.

Because the concert was also broadcast on the radio, it instantly made a nationwide impact, including on a 10-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. listening from home. Additionally, Anderson’s concert inspired the structure and format of similar performances for years to come. In 1946, actor, singer and lifelong activist Paul Robeson hosted the American Crusade Against Lynching, a rally and concert on the National Mall designed to call on President Harry Truman and Congress to back federal anti-lynching legislation.

Perhaps the most famous moment to take place on the National Mall was Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, which was a keynote of the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The demonstration gathered over 200,000 people, calling on President John F. Kennedy to propose and support the passage of a strong federal civil rights bill.

While King’s speech remains the widely lauded highlight of the march, he was only one of the high-profile speakers and performers that day. Marian Anderson opened the march with the national anthem followed by speeches from civil rights leader and future Congressman John Lewis and NAACP leader Myrlie Evers as well as a performance by gospel star Mahalia Jackson, among others. Notable figures in the crowd included Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Diahann Carroll, Sammy Davis Jr., Charlton Heston, Rita Moreno, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

In the year leading up to the inaugural Earth Day rally on the National Mall on April 22, 1970, an increasing number of Americans—particularly those of college age and younger—were deeply concerned about unregulated pollutants in the atmosphere and the lack of protections for wildlife and America’s forests and open spaces. In January 1969, the country was horrified by the manmade devastation that the Santa Barbara oil spill wrought off the California coast.

Earth Day’s founder Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat from Wisconsin, thought that the burgeoning environmental movement in the United States needed highly visible protests, teach-ins and marches, similar to the Vietnam War protests happening at the time. Earth Day rallies and events were scheduled for April 22, 1970, in cities and college campuses across the country, including in the nation’s capital. Roughly 5,000 mostly young people gathered on the National Mall to hear speeches from activists like Earth Day co-organizer Denis Hayes and journalist I.F. Stone as well as performances by singers Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs.

Nationwide, roughly 20 million people attended an Earth Day event. The movement had an immediate impact on public opinion and the U.S. government’s approach to the environment: Earth Day is credited with playing an instrumental role in the passage and signing of both the Clean Air and National Environmental Education acts and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

When the original AIDS Memorial Quilt was unveiled in October 1987, it was a moment of profound public grief—and a call for a strong government response to American deaths usually concealed in silence due to the ignorance, stigma and homophobia that surrounded the disease. The brainchild of activist Cleve Jones, the quilt included 1,920 panels and covered a size larger than a football field. Jones, a longtime San Francisco resident, initially got the idea for the project in 1985 when he learned that over 1,000 San Franciscans had died of the disease. It was unveiled during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.

On that fall October day, six teams of eight volunteers carefully unfolded the AIDS Memorial Quilt at sunrise, while family members, elected officials, friends and life partners read out the names of the people it memorialized. Half a million people viewed the quilt during its opening weekend, sparking its four-month tour across the country and exponential growth as additional panels were made to memorialize more AIDS victims. When the quilt returned to the National Mall the next year, more than 6,300 panels had been added.

Some of the most prominent marches in the history of the National Mall have been dedicated to women’s and reproductive rights. In April 2004, more than 1.1 million people gathered at the mall for the March for Women’s Lives, a large-scale event dedicated to voicing support for the preservation of abortion rights and calling out the need for wider access to birth control and comprehensive prenatal and maternal care. In addition to featuring remarks from then-Senator Hillary Clinton and Representative Nancy Pelosi, The New York Times reported the crowd was dominated by college students and families, some of whom brought multiple generations together to march. Celebrities in attendance included Whoopi Goldberg, Ashley Judd, Kathleen Turner, Cybill Shepherd and Ted Turner.