This column appears every other week in Foster’s Daily Democrat, Portsmouth Herald and the Tuskegee News. This week, Guy Trammell, an African American man from Tuskegee, Ala., and Amy Miller, a white woman from South Berwick, Maine, talk about the Lincoln Memorial on the occasion of its 100th birthday.

On Feb. 12, 1900, 500 colored schoolchildren gathered at Jacksonville, Florida's Stanton School to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. The school’s principal, James Weldon Johnson, who was also a lawyer and a civil rights organizer, composed a poem to introduce the speaker for the occasion. The speaker was Booker T. Washington, and the poem would later be put to music by Johnson’s younger brother and become an enduring song across the nation.

Booker T. Washington recalled his mother’s tears of joy when "a man on the horse,” sent by Lincoln in 1863, read to them the proclamation that Black people, held in forced and cruel bondage labor, were set free to live as citizens. Booker honored Lincoln daily in his life’s work at Tuskegee, working tirelessly to create a civilization of excellence for Black people everywhere.

In 1897, the U.S. Congress authorized construction of a Lincoln memorial, and in 1911 appropriated $2 million for the project. On Feb. 12, 1914, Joseph Blackburn of the Lincoln Memorial Commission, a Civil War Confederate lieutenant, was first to lift a shovel at the ground breaking, saying “Lincoln is now regarded as the greatest of all Americans ...by the South and the North.”

In 1922, the Lincoln Memorial was completed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and Tuskegee Institute’s principal, Robert Russa Moton, was selected as the dedication ceremony’s main speaker, the only African American on the program. However, 12 days before the dedication the president of the Lincoln Memorial Commission, Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft, asked to review Moton’s speech. Taft found the speech much too radical for the time; they wanted to celebrate the man Lincoln, not freedom for enslaved Black people.

Moton reluctantly revised his speech. Removed was: “From the ends of the earth were brought together the extremes of humanity to prove where the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness should apply with equal force to all mankind.” Also removed was, “So long as any group within our nation is denied the full protection of the law; that task is still unfinished“; and again, “But unless here at home we are willing to grant to the least and humblest citizen the full enjoyment of every constitutional privilege, our boast is but a mockery and our professions as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal before the nations of the earth.”

As crowds assembled for the May 30 dedication, Blacks were roughly and disrespectfully ushered to the “colored section” in back by armed U.S. Marines. Moton could not sit with other speakers and honored guests, including Lincoln’s son Robert. Fully acceptable, however, was the blatant white supremacist segregation and the abuse of Blacks, even as Lincoln’s statue watched!

This May, the memorial turns 100, and Tuskegee University's president, Dr. Charlotte Morris, will be the featured speaker. Without liberty for all, a democratic nation is only mockery. In the words of James Weldon Johnson’s poem used to introduce Booker T. Washington in 1900, now known as the Negro National Anthem, we must all, in the name of Freedom: “Lift every voice and sing, till earth and heaven ring, ring with the harmonies of Liberty!” 

The Lincoln Memorial is open 24 hours a day, and I have joined many others in making a visit past dark, when the illuminated monument with its 36 columns and 19-foot President is particularly impressive.

It’s hard to see from below, but the sculptor carved one of Lincoln’s hands closed to show his determination, while the other hand was left open, representing Lincoln's interest in welcoming the Confederacy back into the Union, and welcoming it without vengeance.

It took until 1922, 100 years ago and 67 years after the Civil War, to raise the funds, agree on a memorial design and get the statue built. Despite a country that then - and now - had serious differences of opinion over race and immigration, the final product remains a symbol of unity and democracy, as intended when it was completed.

The reality that Americans had differences of opinion was not ignored in creating the monument. Rather it was honored throughout.

Designer Henry Bacon used materials from different states: Massachusetts granite; Colorado marble; pink marble from Tennessee; Indiana limestone and Alabama marble (for the ceiling tiles). Sculptor Daniel Chester French carved Lincoln's figure out of marble from Georgia, a dedicated Confederate state.

In keeping with this intent, the first bit of sod turned over for building the monument in 1914 was turned by Rep. Joseph Blackburn of Kentucky, who had been a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Army.

“This memorial will show that Lincoln is now regarded as the greatest of all Americans,” Blackburn said, “and that he is so held by the South as well as the North.”

In the United States, the Lincoln Memorial has represented freedom for all people and hosted key civil rights moments. But the crowd and speakers at the dedication of this memorial were segregated by race. Robert Russa Moton, president of Tuskegee Institute and a central speaker at the event, was forced to sit separately from the mostly white crowd he was addressing.

Seventeen years later, Marian Anderson sang to 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial after she was refused a performance at Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution because she was Black. And Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the monument, his words now etched into the place where he stood.

Although divisions persist, as we strive towards a nation of true democracy, we might look to the Lincoln Memorial for a reminder that if the North and South could stay together as a union after the Civil War, certainly we can find a way to work together as a nation in 2022.

Amy and Guy can be reached at colorusconnected@gmail.com.