The famous Lincoln Memorial was vandalized with green paint, inexplicably, as of yet, as police do not know who did so or why, but nevertheless closed the Memorial down to clean the marble statue. Nothing was written on the memorial, no symbols, just a splash of green paint around the president’s leg, an act that Carol Bradley Johnson, spokeswoman for the National Mall land Memorial Parks divisions of the National Park Service called “heartbreaking.”
What seems at best a stupid prank occurred at around 1:30 a.m., and police had since blocked off the area with police tape, while they experiment with different cleaners to find the based “conservation-based cleansers” to use, along with pressurized water sprayers, and plastic scrapers, to do the least damage to the statue as they restore it.
The statue is a neo-classical memorial to one of the most famous and well-respected presidents of the United States. Many regard George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to be the top two presidents the States have ever had, and school-children used to celebrate a holiday for each, until the holidays were conflated into the more generic “President’s Day.”
The site of this specific memorial, which is surrounded by 36 fluted Doric columns, representing the 36 states in the union at the president’s assassination, and contains the script for his Gettysburg Address, perhaps the most famous speech a president ever made, inscribed upon the wall, has been the place where many historically interesting episodes took place, such as when Martin Luther King Jr delivered his “I have a Dream” speech on Aug. 28, 1963 after his movement’s March on Washington.
Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009 was also held on the steps.
Such acts of vandalism are rare, though there were a few deliberate and politically motivated acts of vandalism when Christopher Columbus statues were assaulted with red paint, as the Washington Post reported.