Picture thirty-six Doric columns rising above you at one of America's most powerful memorials. Behind you, the Reflecting Pool stretches nearly a third of a mile toward the Washington Monument. Before you, thirty-six Doric columns rise sixty feet into the sky — one for each state in the Union at the time of Lincoln's death. This is the Lincoln Memorial, completed in 1922.
Inside, a nineteen-foot marble Abraham Lincoln gazes toward the Capitol — the building whose dome he insisted on finishing during the Civil War as a symbol that the Union would endure. On the south wall: the Gettysburg Address. On the north: his second inaugural, ending with those twelve words engraved in stone — 'with malice toward none, with charity for all.'
This spot carries the full weight of American history. On August 28th, 1963, a quarter million people crowded these steps and the Mall below when Martin Luther King Jr. stood here and delivered 'I Have a Dream.' In 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow Black opera singer Marian Anderson to perform in their concert hall, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for her to sing right here instead, to a crowd of seventy-five thousand.
The Tidal Basin sits to your left, the Vietnam Wall to your right, and Washington Monument straight ahead. This is the symbolic center of the National Mall — and of the American conscience.