Part of the L’Enfant Plan, Lincoln Park was first designed as a park following the Civil War as a memorial to Abraham Lincoln. Now it is home to statues honoring both President Lincoln and noted educator and women’s and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune (in the distance). Installed on her 99th birthday in 1974, the Bethune statue depicts her passing her legacy to two children; the cane she is holding is modeled on the one given to her by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom she advised on minority problems. It is the first memorial to honor a black woman in a public park in Washington, D.C. Funds for the monument, by the sculptor Robert Berks, were raised by the National Council of Negro Women, an organization she founded in 1935.

The Emancipation Memorial, which includes a sculpture of President Lincoln, was created by Thomas Ball and dedicated on April 14, 1876. Frederick Douglass was the keynote speaker at the ceremony and President Ulysses S Grant was in attendance. The memorial was paid for with funds contributed solely by formerly enslaved people, most of them African American veterans of the Union Army, although Charlotte Scott, a freed woman of Virginia, made the first contribution of $5. The statue originally faced west towards the US Capitol but was rotated east to face the memorial honoring Bethune. Lincoln Park is included in the District’s African American Heritage Trail.

This is the first time since June that there hasn’t been a fence and bollards surrounding the statues. I was happy to see them go, but the police are keeping a close eye on the park to make sure the statues aren’t defaced (or worse).

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For more information on this historic sites, go to the restoration society’s web page for the tour at http://chrs.org/historic-sites-tour-2020/

Best to view in "Original" because other versions resized by Pbase are decidedly unsharp.

Signs of the times? posted earlier: