Talk of a memorial to President Abraham Lincoln began shortly after he was assassinated in 1865, and it began to become a reality when construction started in 1914. Congress agreed to a design by New York architect Henry Bacon, who modeled the monument after the Greek temple Parthenon because he believed a memorial to a man who defended democracy during the American Civil War should be based on a structure from the birthplace of democracy. The memorial is filled with symbols of a united nation: it is made of stone from northern and southern states, its 36 Doric columns represent the states at the time of Lincoln's death, and the upper frieze bears the names of the 48 states in existence when it was completed. Inside stands a 19-foot-tall statue of Lincoln, the walls carry the Gettysburg and Second Inaugural Addresses, and above are allegorical paintings exploring unity and emancipation. The memorial later became a symbol for the Black civil rights movement after Marian Anderson sang on its steps in 1939 when she had been denied the chance to perform at Constitution Hall, and after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech there during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Earlier proposals had looked very different, including Clark Mills's 1867 multi-tiered 36-figure design near the U.S. Capitol and John Russell Pope's 1911 concepts for a Mayan temple, a ziggurat, and a pyramid.
