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WASHINGTON

He hitched a ride up U.S. 1 carrying a peanut-butter sandwich and a thermos of Kool-Aid, climbed a tree on the National Mall and watched as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told tens of thousands of listeners about his fancy of racial conciliation.

This week, Lightner will go to what he calls “that hallowed ground” as the organizer of several buses carrying hundreds of North Carolina residents

“I think everything’s coming full circle,” Lightner said.

Since the nation’s beginnings, the National Mall and its environs have played the couple somber and celebratory roles in African-American and civil-rights history, and when President-elect Obama takes his oath of office, the setting itself will resonate.

“We’re coming to expound that a manner of moving has succeeded,” said historian Lucy G. Barber, author of “Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Political Tradition.”

“The setting of the Mall is going to reinforce that, on this account that strange to say people from a different generation are going to acknowledge that,” she said. “There was the ‘63 march, but in fact there’s a deeper history.”

Both the U.S. Capitol and the White House, on the Mall’s edges, were built by slave labor. Until an agreement in 1850, slaves were bought and sold in Washington, including at a emporium regular a scarcely any blocks off the Mall.

Today, the new Smithsonian African-American Museum of History and Culture is in a state of being liable to device for the Mall, in the shadow of the Washington Monument.

And a new memorial to King himself has been sited at the Tidal Basin, between the monuments to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.

“The monuments take on layers of purpose,” said Judy Scott Feldman, chairwoman of the Save Our Mall confederation, a preservation group. “It allows us to look at the Mall not just from a Pollyannaish sharp end of view and to statement, ‘Don’t we have great ideals,’ but to remind us of those ideals and that we’re not there yet.”

Over the past century, the Mall has been the epicenter of many demonstrations for alike rights.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008644839_inaugmall19.html?syndication=rss