May 30 · This Day in America
Fifty thousand people gather on the marshy edge of the Potomac to unveil the seated marble figure of Abraham Lincoln, gazing east down the Mall. Chief Justice Taft speaks. President Harding speaks. Robert Todd Lincoln, the president's last surviving son, sits and watches the father of his country's salvation become stone. Robert Russa Moton, principal of Tuskegee, is invited to speak — and then pressured to cut five hundred words about the unfinished work of equality. The Black attendees, including Civil War veterans, are herded behind a rope into a segregated section; some walk out. The temple to the man who freed the enslaved is dedicated in a city that still segregates the crowd before him. Both things are true at once. Forty-one years later, a preacher will stand on those same steps and tell the country it still has a dream to keep.
Source: www.smithsonianmag.com
Also on this day · 1868
By order of General John A. Logan, May 30 is set aside to strew flowers on the graves of the Civil War dead — chosen so the whole country would have spring blooms in reach. At Arlington, five thousand people move among more than twenty thousand graves, Union and Confederate alike, laying flowers on each. The day they invented to grieve a war became Memorial Day, and the nation never put the flowers down.
Source: www.cem.va.gov