In his 1791 plan for the future city of Washington, D.C., Pierre Charles L’Enfant envisioned a garden-lined “grand avenue” approximately one mile long and four hundred feet wide, in an area that would lie between the Congress House (now the United States Capitol) and an equestrian statue of George Washington. The statue would be placed directly south of the President‘s House (now the White House) and directly west of the Congress House. But the planned “grand avenue” was never constructed.

Today, the National Mall is a crucial site for several key events in African-American history. The National Mall’s status as a wide, open expanse at the heart of the capital has made it the perfect location for major protests and rallies. Most famous is the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a political rally during the Civil Rights Movement, at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his speech “I Have a Dream“. The largest officially recorded rally was the Vietnam War Moratorium Rally on October 15, 1969. 

The Three Soldiers is a bronze statue by Frederick Hart. Unveiled on Veterans Day, November 11, 1984, it is part of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the first representation of an African American on the National Mall.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial includes the Stone of Hope, a granite statue of Civil Rights Movement leader Martin Luther King Jr. carved by sculptor Lei Yixin. The inspiration for the memorial design is a line from King’s “I Have A Dream” speech: “Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.” The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) is a Smithsonian Institution museum which opened in September 2016 with a ceremony led by President Barack Obama.

The National Mall contains a number of museums of the Smithsonian Institution, art galleries, cultural institutions, and various memorials, sculptures, and statues, receiving approximately 24 million visitors each year. From the 1970s to 1994, a fiberglass model of a triceratops named “Uncle Beazley” stood on the Mall in front of the National Museum of Natural History.