In 1922, D.C—then home to more African Americans than any other city in the country—boasted a prosperous Black community, with many people migrating to the area to pursue federal jobs and educational opportunities. But segregation and racism remained rampant in the capital, which was still dealing with the aftershocks of a 1919 race massacre in which white mobs attacked Black residents, particularly soldiers returning from service in World War I. Part of a broader wave of unrest now known as the Red Summer, the violence stemmed from Black Americans’ refusal to accept the pre-war status quo—a trend that laid the groundwork for the burgeoning civil rights movement.
At the ceremony, Black attendees found themselves split from the mostly white audience, “abrasively directed” by a white marine to a segregated area behind a rope, according to Thomas’ The Lincoln Memorial and American Life. Though this segregated seating was the norm in 1920s D.C., 21 Black guests left the event in protest; the marine, for his part, reportedly responded to criticism of his behavior by invoking a racial slur and arguing that this was “the only way you can handle these damned [people].”
Compounding the disrespect was the fact that Moton, the dedication’s keynote speaker, was discouraged from delivering his planned speech. In a May 23 telegram to the Tuskegee Institute head, Taft wrote, “Shall have to ask you to cut five hundred words, and suggest that in making the cut you give more unity and symmetry by emphasizing tribute and lessening appeal. I am sure you wish to avoid any insinuation of attempt to make the occasion one for propaganda.” In response, Moton removed several sections, including one declaring “the task for which the immortal Lincoln gave the last full measure of devotion”—namely, racial equality—“still unfinished.”
As Thomas writes, the memorial commission “handpicked” Moton because he was a Republican “accommodationist, not a militant spokesman for [B]lack interests.” But members still deemed his initial comments too inflammatory, and during the ceremony, they took pains to contradict even his muted assertions of continuing inequality. Painting Lincoln’s emancipation of the enslaved as the means to an end, Taft and Harding used their speeches to argue that his “greatness lay in saving the nation.”
“The most prominent speakers’ dedication remarks characterized Lincoln’s presidency as the beginning of a half century-long process of national reunification that, by 1922, had made the United States a rich and powerful nation,” says Anderson.