Consecrating the place to Lincoln's memory really took hold several years later, however, through the efforts begun shortly after the assassination by an African American woman named Charlotte Scott of Virginia. Using her first $5 earned in freedom, Scott kicked-off a fund raising campaign among freed blacks as a way of paying homage to the President who had issued the Emancipation Proclamation that liberated the slaves in the Confederate States. The campaign for the Freedmen's Memorial Monument to Abraham Lincoln, as it was to be known, was not the only effort of the time to build a monument to Lincoln; however, as the only one soliciting contributions exclusively from those who had most directly benefited from Lincoln's act of emancipation it had a special appeal.
In 1959 Congress authorized the National Council of Negro Women to build a memorial to its founder, Mary McLeod Bethune, a well-known African American educator and government advisor. Conceived originally to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963, the monument was not dedicated until 1974 because of problems with fundraising (the bronze memorial ended up costing $400,000) and the priority given by the Council, an umbrella organization of African American women's groups, to the efforts of the Civil Rights movement. The sculptor of the Bethune Memorial was Robert Berks, an artist based in New York who also sculpted the gigantic Kennedy bust in the Grand Foyer of Washington's Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. When it was dedicated in 1974, the Bethune Memorial was the first statue of an African American or a woman of any race on public park land in Washington. (The only previous statue of an African American was that of the freed slave in the Emancipation Group, which was based on Archer Alexander, the last man captured under the Fugitive Slave Act).
Lincoln Park, maintained by the National Park Service, is a public park square that is accessible to the public.