ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that African American's struggles to hold a series of rallies at the Lincoln Memorial between 1939 and 1963 constituted a tactical learning experience that contributed to the civil rights movement's strategies of nonviolent action. It looks toward a cultural history of the civil rights movement. It is necessarily a dual inquiry into not only political tactics but also political imagery, the ambivalent relationship between African Americans and the icon called Abraham Lincoln. The monument and movement were in this sense twinned, but their incompatible interpretations of Abraham Lincoln contributed directly to the rise of a racial politics of memory. American veterans of the Spanish Civil War's Abraham Lincoln Brigade had marched to the memorial in 1938. The Lincoln Memorial protests were celebratory moments when national collective memory seemed to be at its most inclusive, when there seemed to be the widest agreement about Abraham Lincoln's legacy - yet precisely then was the Lincoln symbol most hotly contested.
