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Observations
	LEST WE REMEMBER: An incident in contemporary life (Published February 23, 2004) By CARRIE DEVORAH

Anne James, the Department of the Interior Museum’s assistant curator, stands before Mitchell Jamieson’s mural "An Incident in Contemporary Life." Jamieson immortalized the historic moment, April 9, 1939, when Marion Anderson stood on the Lincoln Memorial steps, 27 years before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered there his "I Have A Dream" speech. James is a gatekeeper for some the nation’s treasures.

James, an art lover, describes the department’s role in this moment in Black History. Anderson, called by Toscannini "the greatest contralto of the world," was booked to sing at Constitution Hall in downtown Washington. Like many "colored" performers of her era, Anderson had gone to Europe to realize her fame. Hall management canceled Anderson’s performance when they realized she was black. Joining public outrage, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, owners of the hall. Then, Secretary of the Interior Harvey Ickels invited Anderson to sing for America on the memorial steps. Anderson delighted her audience of 75,000 blacks and whites mingling together on the grass. Millions of others tuned in at home.

There was no color that day. Just music.

Moments earlier, Anne James braved winter in the department’s inner courtyard. Her gaze rested on Maurice Glickman’s bronze sculpture, "Negro Mother and Child," located there. Words escape the dignity of two women, one black, one white, one bronze, one human. Glickman’s "mother" stoically looks across the yard at a bronze of the young Abraham Lincoln. Her sculpted shoulders are weathered by the elements. A child leans into her curves, one of his arms reaches up to her waist. James is quiet. Apologetic.

Across the Mall, an FDR Memorial gift shop saleswoman asked, "Did you see Martin Luther’s ‘dream’ carved on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial?" His "dream" is absent from official tourism maps or Web sites. She is quick to point out errors on a map sold in her shop. A street directly in front of her concession is not listed. An "x" marking the spot of King’s bronze marker is missing, too. A woman of color, she may be one of the few who recall its installation on Dec. 4, 2000. The National Capital Planning Commission designated in December 1999 four acres west of the FDR Memorial to reflect the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. Former president William Jefferson Clinton decreed the northeast corner of the Tidal Basin "on the axis of the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials" a "quiet and receptive space yet at the same time powerful and emotionally evocative, reflecting the spirit of Dr. King."

King’s "I Have a Dream" speech gave a generation of color their rainbow. The chiseled memorium of his words is unnoticed on an upper level of the Lincoln Memorial’s steps where it is discourteously stepped on. King said, during his Poor People’s city-to-city tour, "We are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars on the radical redistribution of economic power." The intent of his words stumble. Respect has no price tag.

A father chases his son up the Lincoln Memorial stairs, a few days before the official start of the Martin Luther King bank holiday. Hardon stops to see what the lady with the camera is photographing. He kneels, tracing King’s chiseled words, "I Have a Dream." Hardon is from Montgomery, Ala. His father tells the gathering crowd, "We come from where it all began." Hardon now knows that long before King spoke to the people, Marion Anderson sang there fighting for racial freedom.

Almost 70 years after Anderson sang at the memorial, Halle Berry made movie history celebrating another overlooked woman of color, actress Dorothy Dandridge. Dandridge symbolically received her long overdue Oscar in October 2003 when Halle Berry stepped before the world media. Berry, who played Dandridge, said "she opened the door for me – she was never recognized in the way that she should have been. I’m still in the exact same position she was." History does have a way of repeating itself.

A memorial to Abraham Lincoln stands just inside the main portal of the Washington National Cathedral. Outside, winds whip laborer Joseph Birch as he walks to his car. Birch does not complain. Instead, he reads words, on the sunshade he made, honoring Harriet Tubman. "America’s Mother Theresa, Tubman."

Gov. John Andrews of Massachusetts allowed Tubman to serve in the Union Army, at Hilton Head, S.C., under Gen. David Hunter. Tubman’s second husband, Nelson Davis, served in the United States Colored Infantry under Capt. James S. Thompson. When Davis died, Tubman received his veteran’s pension. Tubman, buried with full military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, N.Y., had no descendants the government could pay her pension to.

New York Congressman Edolphus Towns is fighting for Tubman to receive her pension for serving as a nurse and scout during the Civil War. The 55th Congress in 1897 passed HR 4982, a bill that would have placed Tubman on a pension rate of $25 each month, for her services as a nurse. Towns wants the Harriet Tubman Memorial House in Auburn to receive Tubman’s pension. In these days and times of spiraling costs, $11,750 will go a short way. Towns points out two women who posed as men, Albert Cashier and Sarah Edmond Seelye, were paid pensions. Towns writes $11,750 is the amount, adjusted for inflation, "of widow’s pension that Harriet Tubman should have received from January 1899 to March 1913."

Joseph Birch says he is determined government will see his way to "permit railroads in America to post signs at all railroads in America that one can see from where we drive our cars, where railroads cross near local roads and let us participate in putting up federally protected Harriet Tubman Railroad signs in memory of this selfless beauty." "Tubman spirited 300 slaves to freedom without funding," says Birch. "Bob Hope gets an airport. All she got was a lousy $11,750 pension."

Not quite. Hope got an airport, a post office, a Library of Congress multimedia exhibit and more. Towns’ second application for Tubman’s pension was denied in Congress on Jan. 7, 2003. That same day, the House record reflects, Eddie Murray and Gary Carter were to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Joe Remcho was remembered, former Congressman John Collins was honored and the Energy and Science Research Investment Act of 2003 was discussed. "I remain hopeful that this resolution will eventually be passed by Congress so that Harriet Tubman’s contributions during the Civil War will be as well known as her work with the Underground Railroad," said Congressman Towns. Towns’ spokeswoman says he is a patient man. His petitions will continue until he prevails.

As a young child, Birch broke the barrier of prejudice he was raised within. He remembers the day he stopped seeing color. "It was 1966. I was 9. Day after day, I saw a black man working on a bridge. I watched the care he put into his work. The whole while I watched him work on the bridge, I would think to myself: He is not the black man I was taught to fear. He was a fine man. I respected him. The day his bridge was finished, I watched him walk towards me, across the bridge. I decided to walk towards him," said Birch. "I said ‘hi.’ He said ‘hi’ back. And we both kept on walking. It felt good. That was a big day for me." Birch’s son and daughter are blind to color. He taught them to say "Hi, Sir," "Hi, Ma’am," to everyone. "It’s a small thing," says Birch, adjusting the sunshade. He heads back to his scaffolding, warmed inside.

In an era in which people are eager to invest thousands of dollars to build new monuments, older memorials are overlooked. Four paintings depicting the role of Negroes during the Civil War, in Judiciary Square, need restoration. A. Philip Randolph, watching arrivals and departures at Union Station’s Amtrak gates is unseen by many commuters. Randolph, "America’s foremost black labor and civil rights leader," is credited to have "conceived and initiated the 1963 March on Washington for jobs and freedom." Mary Bethune’s statue and "Lincoln and the Slave" share a Northeast Washington park where dogs run freely.

February became Black History Month in 1976. It evolved from historian Carter Woodson’s, "the father of Negro history," vision for a "Negro History Week." It was established in 1926 as the second week in February, the birth month of two men Woodson admired, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. "We have a wonderful history behind us," Woodson said. "To handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst form of lynching. It kills one’s aspirations and dooms him to vagabondage and crime."

Blocks away from a mural honoring Woodson, two school boys are tossing a football back and forth in the chilling winds in Southeast Washington. They are shirtless. It is after school. There is no supervision for them. It is 2004. The wall adorned with Woodson’s words reads, "We should emphasize not a negro in history but the negro in history. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations but the history of the world void of national bias, race and religious prejudice." Passing cars stop mostly for red lights.

Dr. King said, "When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and hamlet, from every state and city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children - black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants - will be able to join hands and to sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last.’"

A few days before the three-day Martin Luther King bank holiday in January, a local television station broadcasts the anticipated opening of the Native American Memorial. On L Street in Northwest Washington, J. Seward Johnson’s statue "Tomorrow," a grandfather of color showing the future to children, is unnoticed by pedestrians. A young woman of color mourning Dr. King, holding a poster announcing "Lest we forget" is front page of a local paper. Meanwhile, the ground for King’s memorial remains unbroken. His bronze marker sits covered in dust.

No. Lest we remember.

Copyright 2004, The Common Denominator