19221776 Club
Taft dedicates the Lincoln Memorial; Black guests are marched to a segregated section
Robert Todd Lincoln, 78 and the president's last surviving son, watches from the crowd as Marines enforce the color line at his father's monument.
Fifty-seven years after Lincoln's assassination, Chief Justice William Howard Taft — the only man to hold both the presidency and the nation's top judicial post — formally dedicated the Lincoln Memorial on May 30, 1922, then handed it to President Warren G. Harding. Robert Todd Lincoln, 78 years old and the president's only surviving son, watched from the crowd. Prominent African American guests, invited to the ceremony, arrived to find themselves directed to a segregated section guarded by U.S. Marines…
