In the early 1960s, more than a decade in advance of the event, city planning director Edmund Bacon initiated bold plans for a Bicentennial commemoration with an additional element: a world’s fair. He wanted to use the nation’s birthday and the international profile of the world’s fair—and the federal dollars these would bring—to advance the agenda of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission. Bacon imagined a thorough redevelopment of the waterfronts in Center City, as well as a “midway” concept that would close Chestnut Street to vehicles except for open-side electric streetcars. An overhead tram would move visitors across the Schuylkill to fairgrounds in Fairmount Park, the same location as the Centennial of 1876.

In short order, however, the initial planning group and Bacon’s early vision were pushed aside by a vocal coalition of architects, planners, and reformers billing themselves as the “young professionals.” Including figures like attorney Stanhope Browne (b. 1931), editor Herbert Lipson (b. 1929), and architect Richard Saul Wurman (b. 1935), this group advocated a much grander concept, a model city built on a four-mile “megastructure” to be constructed above the Pennsylvania Railroad yard on the west bank of the Schuylkill. Meanwhile, planning also grew tense around the lack of inclusion of African Americans in the process.  In response, the Bicentennial Corporation appointed Catherine Sue Leslie, a housing reform activist, to lead the “Agenda for Action.”  This initiative aimed to include minority voices in Bicentennial planning, and Leslie developed a low-cost rival vision for the Bicentennial built around a scattered-site concept that would highlight the racial and ethnic diversity of Philadelphia.

At the national level, in 1966 the Lyndon B. Johnson administration created the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission (ARBC), which was charged with making site recommendations as well as content and funding decisions. In Philadelphia, meanwhile, a Bicentennial Corporation was chartered in 1967 and began working to raise funds, gather public support, and elaborate the theme and design elements of the Bicentennial and world’s fair. Philadelphians also sought to gain a competitive edge over Boston, a rival for the celebrations.

100 Million Visitors Anticipated

In 1969 a Philadelphia delegation presented the ARBC with its “Toward a Meaningful Bicentennial” plan, with the megastructure at the center and five different “core” areas in the city to demonstrate innovative ways to solve America’s urban problems.  Anticipating an estimated 100 million visitors, the projected costs totaled more than a billion dollars.  The ARBC rejected the plan, and in Philadelphia a bitter divide developed along racial lines over the thematic focus and the location. By 1972 progress was stalled, and Mayor Frank Rizzo (1920-91) canceled the world’s fair bid entirely, leaving only the Bicentennial commemoration to go forward. On the national level, the ARBC encouraged celebrations throughout the nation, not just in Philadelphia.

A year packed with Bicentennial-themed events began on New Year’s Eve, 1976, as thousands came to Philadelphia to witness the Liberty Bell being moved from Independence Hall to a new pavilion on Independence Mall. From January through October daily events included activities such as puppet shows, street theater, and concerts. The city hosted the NCAA Final Four tournament as well as all-star games for professional baseball, basketball, and hockey. The week leading up to July 4 was named Freedom Week and featured even more daily celebrations, street parties, parades, picnics, and concerts.  A 2076 time capsule was buried at Second and Chestnut Streets, a 50,000-pound Sara Lee birthday cake was served at Memorial Hall, and fireworks filled the sky throughout the week.

On July 4, 1976, a ceremony on Independence Mall featured President Gerald Ford, Pennsylvania Governor Milton Shapp (1912-1994), and Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, with actor Charlton Heston as the master of ceremonies. Following the ceremony a five-hour parade featured floats from every state and 40,000 marchers. An estimated two million visitors came to Philadelphia to attend these events. On July 6, Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain visited and, with Prince Philip, presented a Bicentennial Bell made in the same foundry as the original Liberty Bell.

During the year-long celebration, Valley Forge, up to this time a state park,  became Valley Forge National Historical Park. On July 3, the winter campsite of George Washington’s Continental Army served as final destination for a commemoration of the westward wagon treks of the nineteenth century.  Six wagon trains totaling 200 wagons, which had traveled for months from all over the nation, converged in Valley Forge in front of a crowd of nearly a half a million people.

Counter-Demonstrations

Along with the patriotic events came counter-demonstrations. Two groups of Philadelphia citizens, the July 4^th Coalition and Rich Off Our Backs Coalition, staged marches and demonstrations during Freedom Week to oppose the celebration.  Their plans prompted Mayor Rizzo to request 15,000 federal troops to maintain order, a request that was denied.  Despite Mayor Rizzo’s concerns, the demonstrations in Fairmount Park and Norris Square Park were peaceful.

Philadelphia’s Bicentennial celebration concluded to mixed reviews.  The event introduced many thousands of Americans to the urban renewal and historic preservation successes of the postwar period in the city. The three blocks composing Independence Mall were added to Independence National Historical Park in 1973, and historic buildings in the park were refurbished.  The Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, now the African American Museum in Philadelphia, and the Mummers Museum both opened in 1976. The Port of History Museum on Penn’s Landing at Walnut Street was designed as a Bicentennial gift from the state to the city, but it did not open until 1981. The Society Hill neighborhood, Elfreth’s Alley, and Penn’s Landing were all popular sites during the celebration.

While Freedom Week brought large crowds to Philadelphia, attendance at Philadelphia’s historical sites dropped quickly afterward.  The total number of visitors to Philadelphia in 1976 was estimated to be between 14 and 20 million, which fell far short of the planners’ expectations.  Much of the shortfall may be attributed to fear of violence spread by media attention to the protests and the mayor’s reaction to them. During the Bicentennial there was also an outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease. Hundreds of members of the American Legion staying at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel contracted an infectious disease through the hotel’s air conditioning system, killing more than thirty of the Legionnaires.

Despite Philadelphians’ initial visions for a transformative event, the planning price tag of more than $50 million may have been too high considering the lack of long-term benefits. Features that were meant to bring lasting value, like a Living History Center or the Chestnut Street Transitway, were considered a thorn in the city’s side just five years later.  It would be hard to imagine a more challenging period of time—with civil rights struggles, the Vietnam War, and Watergate fresh in mind, and the effects of racial strife, white flight, crime, and deindustrialization apparent in American cities—to hold a patriotic celebration. Philadelphia could not alter the calendar or reshape the larger context of the Bicentennial year.

Madison Eggert-Crowe is a graduate of Drexel University (2010) and is pursuing her Master’s in Public Administration at University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government. Scott Gabriel Knowles is associate professor of history at Drexel University. He is the author of The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America (2011) and Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City (2009). (Authors’ information current at time of publication.)

The International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine, more simply known as “the Centennial,” opened in Fairmount Park to great fanfare on May 10, 1876, and closed with equal flourish six months later. Modeled after the Crystal Palace Great Exhibition in London in 1851, and the first in a long line of major “world’s fairs” in the United States, the Centennial exhibited national pride and belief in the importance of education and progress through industrial innovation. An additional mission of the Centennial grew from a desire to forgive and forget the Civil War.

Philadelphia had precedent for such a fair.  The Great Central Fair of 1864, one of many held throughout the Union during the Civil War, anticipated the combination of public, private, and commercial efforts that were necessary for the Centennial. The Great Central Fair, held on Logan Square, had a similar gothic appearance, the waving flags, the huge central hall, the “curiosities” and relics, handmade and industrial exhibits, and even a visit from the President and his family.

The idea for presenting a World Exposition in Philadelphia honoring the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was first presented to Mayor Morton McMichael (1807-79) in 1866 by Professor John Campbell of Wabash College, Indiana. In 1871, with support from prominent businessmen such as John Wanamaker (1838-1922), the Republican political machine, and the Franklin Institute, the city and state successfully petitioned Congress to authorize the Centennial and set up a commission to oversee planning and implementation.  The legislation explicitly excluded federal funding for the fair.  The commissioners, led by Joseph R. Hawley from Connecticut as chairman and Alfred T. Goshorn from Ohio as director-general, were not political appointees but leaders in business.  They were confident that the undertaking could be handled by private enterprise.

Although rich in historic associations, Philadelphia also presented problems as a site for the fair. Business sponsors and nonprofit organizations quarreled over whether to focus on commercial achievements or on American progress in the arts and sciences. Outside Pennsylvania, some suspected that the Centennial was merely an attempt to promote Philadelphia and its industries, and the nationally publicized kidnapping of 4-year-old Charley Ross from Germantown in 1874 painted the Philadelphia police force as corrupt and incompetent, raising fears for the safety of visitors.

Years of Fundraising

The Panic of 1873 dried up private financing.  Fair organizers devoted the next several years to attracting attention and money from national, state, and foreign governments; from organizations like churches and universities; and from industrial and commercial associations. They enlisted newspapers all over the country in the cause. Members of the Women’s Centennial Committee had the most success raising funds, going from door-to-door in thirty-one states, selling stock and bringing in $100,000 in contributions. Still, with insufficient capital on hand as the opening neared, and the prestige of the United States at stake, the federal government was forced to step up. The government required repayment as first creditor, thus dooming the fair corporation to financial failure.

As a popular attraction, however, the Centennial was a great success. At a time when the population of the United States was 46 million, and that of Philadelphia less than one million, almost ten million paid admissions were recorded, with most people paying fifty cents to attend. While the majority of visitors were from Pennsylvania and its neighbors, 20,000 signed in from Illinois and more than 2,000 from California. On their special state days, Pennsylvania and New York each recorded over 250,000 attendees, while New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland listed over 10,000 each.

The Centennial overlooked the Schuylkill River, with 250 pavilions and seven miles of avenues and walkways occupying a 285-acre tract of Fairmount Park’s 3,160 acres. Many visitors arrived at the temporary “centennial station” of the Pennsylvania railroad and entered through the newly invented automatic turnstile.  They found numerous fountains and statuary placed strategically throughout the grounds, prominent among them the arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty. Concessionaires, who paid up to 50 percent of their take for the privilege doing business within the fair, operated stands selling cigars, soda water, and popcorn, and theme-oriented restaurants, including French, Turkish, and Viennese.

42 Acres of Farm Exhibits

The Centennial Commission owned and managed thirty-four structures, including five central buildings that covered more than fifty acres. The largest, the Main Exhibition Hall, included exhibits on education and science but concentrated largely on the industrial arts and on selling merchandise. Machinery Hall housed the huge Corliss Engine, both the power source for the fair and perhaps its most popular attraction.  Exhibitors demonstrated their processes of manufacturing while also offering their products for sale, increasing the interest of visitors. Agricultural Hall where the latest in farm equipment was demonstrated, along with forty-two acres of farm and livestock exhibits, was of particular significance for the still largely-agricultural nation. Horticultural Hall with its Victorian gardens and Memorial Hall with its exhibit of international fine arts were smallest of the main grouping.  Other buildings run by the Commission included fire and police stations, a medical department, and seven “public comfort” stations.

The remainder of the buildings, just over two hundred, represented several interests. The United States government contributed seven structures, including a main exhibit hall housing the Smithsonian collection, which later formed the nucleus of the Smithsonian Institution museum. Of the twenty-six states that erected buildings, most were either Pennsylvania’s neighbors or from the mid- or far West. Most of the South was still smarting from its loss of the Civil War and resented the request to spend money in the North which had caused so much loss and devastation to its own region.  Only Mississippi participated from the deep South, frustrating the attempt of the Centennial Commission and the Federal government to present a picture of a country reunited. While thirty-eight foreign countries had a presence, only fifteen provided their own buildings. Forty buildings, the largest number, were either commercial enterprises like the Singer Sewing Machine Company or community service groups like the Bible Society.

The Commission advertised the main value of the Fair as educational, urging visitors to compare the contemporary strides in technology and learning with the state of the country one hundred years earlier, but the growth of a consumer society made shopping one of the most popular activities. The fair also offered frequent entertainment by musical groups from symphony orchestras to minstrel bands, special days sponsored by states and nearby businesses, and events like hot-air balloon ascensions and fireworks displays.  Huge crowds turned out for the music, speeches, and celebrations that marked the opening and closing of the fair and the Fourth of July.  “Curiosities” such as a full-sized Liberty Bell made of soap, “Liberty accompanying Washington” done in human hair, and a Centennial medallion carved in butter attracted attention.

Sideshows Arose Nearby

Outside the gates, a small, temporary city grew up along what later became Parkside Avenue. Flimsy, wooden structures housed dubious hotels, low-end restaurants, ice cream saloons, beer gardens, and “shows,” and were sandwiched two or three deep on narrow lots.  They stretched a mile in each direction from the main gate and provided entertainment the Commissioners deemed inappropriate on the grounds proper. Profits trumped morality, however, and when attendance flagged at the fair, the organizers allowed the sale of wine and beer.  However, they resisted opening on Sundays, and amusement-park rides and “hoochie koochie dancers” had to await the Chicago Fair of 1893.

Other values of the times were also on display, although not intentionally. Contempt and dislike of African Americans, laborers, and non-Anglo-Saxon foreigners often found expression in crude humor, such as exaggerated dialect, cartoons and stories found in books written about the Centennial. Victorian sensibilities demoted the graphic painting “The Gross Clinic” (1875) by Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) to the Army medical hall and banned all works by women from the Memorial Hall Art Exhibit.

A patronizing attitude toward women also pervaded the Centennial. Women responded with their own pavilion, built with funds completely raised by women, with all exhibits created and operated by them. Many labor-saving devices for domestic use, invented by women, formed part of the exhibit. While traditional forms of women’s work in needlework and china painting and achievements in the fine arts were not ignored, women also acted as engineers, wood workers, and printers, turning out newspapers and furniture and operating fabric-producing machinery. The chair of the Women’s Centennial Committee, Elizabeth Duane Gillespie (1821- 1901), a descendant of Benjamin Franklin, was seated on the platform for the fair’s closing ceremonies, but when rain curtailed the number of invited guests, admission was “refused to ladies’ tickets.”

Almost immediately after the Centennial closed, most physical remains were removed, either taken elsewhere or broken down and sold for parts. Much of the statuary and many of the fountains remained, as did the Ohio State building and two small, brick buildings used as “comfort stations.”

The Centennial Exhibition featured exhibits of American technological advances alongside vignettes from the Colonial era. “The New England farm-house,” for example, presented a picture of domestic industry, complete with tools for traditional arts like candle making and an “old flax wheel from Plymouth.” The state of New Jersey highlighted its revolutionary history by reconstructing the Ford Mansion, the Morristown headquarters of George Washington (1732-99). These exhibits encouraged Americans to grasp a shared past, but the past they presented did not reflect colonial America’s diversity; instead, Anglo-American contributions dominated the conversation.

Although the Centennial Exhibition ended after six months, interest in romanticized, Anglicized versions of early-American architecture, landscapes, and decorative arts continued and evolved through the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Philadelphia became a geographic touchstone in the Colonial Revival movement as collectors like Henry Francis du Pont (1880-1969) turned their attention toward American decorative arts and furniture. At the same time, writers like Harold Eberlein (1875-1965), Anne Hollingsworth Wharton (1845-1928), and Robert (1860-1923) and Elizabeth (1871-1936) Shackleton produced hundred of books on the decorative arts and architecture, feeding the national obsession with all things “colonial.”

Architectural Characteristics

As the Colonial Revival gained momentum, nineteenth- and twentieth-century architects studied the Delaware Valley’s early English, German, Dutch, and Swedish buildings, focusing on their common elements to create a distinct Colonial Revival architectural style. Those elements included double-hung windows with shutters; hipped, gable, or gambrel roofs; and local building materials, such as stone. These features dotted the landscape of the Philadelphia area through the work of architects like Richardson Brognard Okie (1875-1945). Born in Camden, New Jersey, Okie completed his studies in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania during the first wave of the Colonial Revival movement. His designs of private residences, such as the H.B. Du Pont house in-Wilmington, Delaware, featuring stone exteriors, prominent chimneys, wide floorboards, and hand-wrought nails—hallmarks of his Pennsylvania farmhouse style. Another Philadelphia architect, Charles Barton Keen (1868-1931), designed Colonial Revival houses for wealthy Philadelphians then extended his practice along the East Coast.

While some architects employed vernacular building techniques, others paid homage to high-style Georgian architecture, with its symmetrical brick facades, central cupolas, and entrances with pediments. Architects Frank Miles Day (1861-1918) and Charles Z. Klauder (1872-1938) opted for stately Georgian grandeur when they designed “The Green” for the University of Delaware in 1917, giving an architectural nod to Delaware’s status as the first state. Whether they were going for the quaint charm of vernacular architecture or the classical elegance of Georgian architecture, Colonial Revival architects featured common eighteenth-century characteristics to give an impression of the past, rather than reproduce it.

The National Preservation Movement and the Colonial Revival

In the first decades of the twentieth century, architects who spearheaded the Colonial Revival style also participated in an emerging national preservation movement, working with new organizations like Colonial Williamsburg and the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities to bring Colonial buildings back to their former glory. Philadelphia was also an epicenter of historic preservation projects: Fiske Kimball (1888-1955), director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, led the restoration of Fairmount Park’s eighteenth-century mansions. The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America installed a Colonial Revival garden on the grounds of Stenton, the home of James Logan (1674-1751). For his part, Okie took on the restoration of the Betsy Ross House. The Women’s Committee of the Sesquicentennial International Exposition (1926) also selected Okie to head the reconstruction of Philadelphia’s Colonial High Street.

While these projects drew praise and adoration by many, they frustrated ethnic groups that had been steamrolled by the Anglocentric narrative of the preservation movement. Determined to showcase their contributions to American history, ethnic heritage groups organized their own celebrations and projects. In 1913, African Americans in Philadelphia and other cities across the country celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1926, Dr. Amandus Johnson (1877-1974) founded the American Swedish Historical Museum in South Philadelphia to honor the contributions of America’s early Swedes. Despite these and other efforts, nativist sentiments persisted in Philadelphia, and the historical narrative remained relatively unchanged.

Historians also voiced concerns as some preservation projects favored aesthetics over historical accuracy. In the 1930s, Okie headed the reconstruction of Pennsbury Manor, the country estate of William Penn (1644-1718) in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. University of Pennsylvania historian Albert Cook Myers (1874-1960) withdrew his support from the project when he determined it reflected Okie’s personal taste rather than the archaeological and historical evidence. Myers went so far as to call the project a “monstrosity of vicious error.” Despite criticism from Myers and others, the reconstructed estate opened to the public in 1939. While the reconstruction of Pennsbury Manor and other historic preservation projects inspired public interest in the Colonial era, they also blurred the lines between historical and stylized impressions of the past.

The New Deal and Public Architecture

The Colonial Revival movement maintained popularity in the 1930s as a new crisis, the Great Depression, gripped the nation. Colonial Revival architecture continued in the form of new public buildings through the New Deal initiatives of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945). Programs including the Public Works Administration and Works Progress Administration funded the construction and improvement of libraries, post offices, and public schools, such as the Pierre S. Du Pont High School building (later the Pierre S. Du Pont Middle School) in Wilmington, Delaware, and Jenkintown Elementary School in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. Government funds also went toward the improvement of existing Colonial structures, including Independence Hall; the Trent House in Trenton, New Jersey; and the Vernon-Wister House in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia.

Buildings with brick facades and central cupolas offered a familiar, comfortable aesthetic as an alternative to the sleek, modern Art Deco architecture of the 1920s. Once again, the Colonial Revival movement served as a distraction from the hardships of modern life and encouraged Euro-Americans to look to a romantic version of the past for hope.

Beyond World War II

After the Second World War, suburban neighborhoods inspired a new wave of Colonial Revival architecture—one that was more economical and accessible to the growing middle class. The two Levittown suburbs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey advertised the 1957 “Colonial” as one of six house models. The two-story home offered traditional appeal with room for modern amenities, including a garage. While mass-produced “neocolonial” homes lacked the decorative elements of earlier Colonial Revival homes, they provided buyers with a simplified version using cost-effective materials. Families could continue the theme into the interior living spaces with midcentury versions of Colonial Revival furniture and color palettes. Once again, ideas of peaceful, colonial domesticity hit a chord with post-war, white Americans. However, as before, the Colonial Revival served as a figurative as well as literal façade, this time masking anxiety over suburban housing integration. The same year the “Colonial” debuted, the first African American family moved into a Levittown, Pennsylvania, home. The severe harassment they faced showed their neighbors did not mean to extend “American dream” (and the dream home) to all Americans.

While modernism dominated aesthetics in the 1960s and 1970s, the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976 resurrected Colonial Revival style and placed Philadelphia in the spotlight once more. Interest in Colonial history ebbed and flowed through the rest of the twentieth century, but the Colonial Revival remained in the country’s national consciousness. It peaked during times of social unrest, national crises, and historical milestone anniversary celebrations—moments when white Americans looked for common virtues and ways to maintain familiar social orders. Once maligned for its historical inaccuracies, in the late twentieth century the Colonial Revival became a subject of study and interest among historians. As a physical representation of American virtues and a hub of Colonial history and lore, Philadelphia remained at the fore of the Colonial Revival movement.

Danielle Lehr Schagrin is the former Education Program Coordinator at Pennsbury Manor, the reconstruction of William Penn’s country estate. She completed an internship with the Colonial Williamsburg Teacher Institute and holds an M.A. in History with a concentration in public history from Lehigh University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Observed on the second Monday in October, Columbus Day in the Philadelphia region gained prominence as Italian immigrant communities grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By commemorating the 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) in the New World, Italian-Americans embraced the navigator as their countryman, celebrated Italian culture, and called attention to their American loyalty and identity. While the practices and places for observing Columbus Day changed over time, the holiday in Philadelphia and its suburbs retained a distinctively Italian flavor even as Columbus became a controversial figure in American history.

The first major anniversary of Columbus to be celebrated in the United States, 1792, passed quietly in Philadelphia although not without notice. While Boston and New York hosted public events, in Philadelphia the nationally circulated Daily American Advertiser published an oration about Columbus delivered earlier at Princeton College in New Jersey.

The reputation of Columbus as an American hero grew during the nineteenth century following the 1827 publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, by Washington Irving. It was not until the 1860s, however, that Columbus Day emerged as an annual celebration among Italian immigrant communities, first in New York in 1866 and in Philadelphia by 1869. That year, the Societá di Unione e Fratellanza Italiana, a mutual aid society in South Philadelphia, held the first in a series of annual balls on October 12 and made honoring Columbus one of its central activities. In 1876, Italian-Americans dedicated a monument of Columbus in Fairmount Park as their contribution to the Centennial celebration of the United States.

Italian-Americans embraced Columbus because of the place of his birth, the city-state of Genoa, within the region that became part of the Italian nation formed in 1861. Although Columbus’s birthplace has at times been debated by scholars and others, nineteenth-century immigrants to the United States did not question their shared heritage with the “discoverer” of America. They also identified with Columbus on the basis of shared religion, and the Catholic Church became a major proponent of commemorating Columbus for his role in extending Catholicism to the New World.

The ethnic and religious character of the holiday was clear in Philadelphia in 1892, the four-hundredth anniversary of the first Columbus voyage, which came in the midst of a surge of Italian immigration. In addition to celebrations in Italian neighborhoods, the Columbus commemoration activities that year included a torchlight parade of Catholic organizations on Broad Street, a Solemn Pontifical Mass at the Cathedral on Logan Square, and a performance by parochial schoolchildren at the Academy of Music.

As an expression of American identity, Columbus Day had a patriotic spirit that combined with its ties to religion and ethnicity. As state governments began to grant legal status to the holiday in the first decades of the twentieth century, participation widened to include public officials, office-seekers, and military units. Patriotic overtones were especially apparent in Philadelphia during the Cold War era as parades and ceremonies at Independence Hall from the 1950s through the 1970s symbolically linked the arrival of Columbus in America with the founding of the republic.

Monuments to Christopher Columbus have anchored and sometimes shifted the location of Columbus Day observances. The Columbus monument dedicated in Fairmount Park in 1876 served as a focal point for commemoration for the next century, until the statue was moved to Marconi Plaza in South Philadelphia during the bicentennial year of 1976. Following its dedication there by Mayor Frank Rizzo (1920-91), the monument’s new location in the city’s traditionally Italian neighborhood became the destination of the annual Columbus Day parade. In Camden, a Columbus monument erected in 1915 by the Sons of Italy in Forest Hill Park (later renamed Farnham Park) played a similar role as a site of commemoration in the first half of the twentieth century. A Columbus monument in Norristown, Pennsylvania, dedicated in 1992 after years of effort, from that point forward became the centerpiece for celebration each year in the Montgomery County seat.

By the time of the five-hundredth anniversary of the first Columbus voyage in 1992, celebrating the navigator became more controversial and contentious. When the Philadelphia City Council voted in 1989 to rename a portion of Delaware Avenue as Columbus Boulevard, Native Americans protested that Columbus represented conquest of their land and neighborhood groups resisted the loss of a familiar street name. In 1992 Penn’s Landing gained a new, modern obelisk to honor Columbus, but on the day of its unveiling a group dressed as Native Americans splattered the monument with red paint and painted over “Columbus Boulevard” street signs.

While the history and reputation of Columbus became a matter of national and international debate, the region’s tourism promoters sought to draw visitors with a year of events called “Neighbors in the New World,” to emphasize multicultural unity and progress. Many museums and organizations embraced the theme, but others such as the annual American Indian Arts Festival at the Rankokus Reservation in Burlington County, New Jersey, stressed the cultural traditions that Columbus’s arrival endangered.

Adding to the layers of layers of multiculturalism and conflict attached to Columbus Day by the early twenty-first century, monuments to Columbus became flashpoints of controversy during the social justice uprisings of 2020. Camden removed its Columbus monument from  Farnham Park, and demonstrators converged on the monument in South Philadelphia to protest its presence while others assembled to protect it. The City of Philadelphia enclosed the monument in a box until its future could be determined. Defenders of the monument echoed the continuing tradition of Columbus Day in South Philadelphia as a celebration of Italian heritage and the contributions of immigrants to Greater Philadelphia and the nation.

Charlene Mires is Professor of History at Rutgers-Camden and Editor-in-Chief of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

As a cause for commemoration, the signing of the U.S. Constitution historically has struggled to compete with the Declaration of Independence for national recognition and ardor.  In contrast to the dramatic act of independence, the framing of the national government is a more sober and complex narrative not easily celebrated with barbecues and fireworks. In Philadelphia, the site of the Constitutional Convention, commemoration of the document’s major anniversaries also has been complex and has reflected how regard for the Constitution and its connections to the city have evolved over time.

For Philadelphia and the nation, the Constitution’s major anniversaries often occurred in times of conflict that notably inspired and informed the celebrations. While the Golden Jubilee in 1837 passed largely unobserved, September 17, the date on which the Convention signed the Constitution, was recognized occasionally throughout the early 1800s. Such commemorations often served political purposes; in the 1850s, for example, Philadelphia’s Democratic Party staged commemorations as a counterpoint to the anti-immigrant nativist politicians who dominated city government. Similar tributes also cropped up during the strife of the Civil War.

In contrast to these limited observances, the Constitution’s 100^th anniversary in 1887 was treated as an opportunity to demonstrate national progress in a three-day spectacle reminiscent of the 1876 Centennial International Exhibition. A lack of Congressional interest and funding effectively ceded responsibility for the festivities to Philadelphia, which organizers styled the “Mecca of America,” much to the chagrin of rival cities such as New York. In an era of rising immigration and agitation from groups including laborers, suffragettes, and African Americans, proclamations of national unity and reverence for the storied Revolutionary past dominated the proceedings, which began on September 15 with a Civic and Industrial Procession on Broad Street. The procession featured 21,029 representatives from the city’s trade and commercial organizations, as well as 2,106 musicians and 497 massive floats depicting key moments in American history. A military parade, the largest in the nation’s history, followed the next day and celebrations concluded on September 17 at Independence Square. Attended by President Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), the ceremonies included a Marine band led by John Philip Sousa (1854-1932) and speeches that venerated Constitutional principles while overlooking any conflict regarding the document’s drafting and ratification.

Centennial Draws 500,000 Visitors

Approximately 500,000 visitors and one million local residents observed the Centennial proceedings, which emphasized mass participation even though the contributions of African Americans, women, and ethnic groups were largely scripted or overlooked. Despite resistance from Black and tribal leaders, participation by both African Americans and American Indians was limited to a series of “object-lessons” that celebrated progress towards the Anglo-Saxon ideal. The Carlisle Industrial Indian School, which removed Indian youth from reservations and sought to assimilate them into American society, was a centerpiece of the Civic and Industrial Procession, and a series of floats glorified the African American journey from slavery to emancipation. In both instances, organizers downplayed social conflict and stressed national harmony and unity, themes echoed in the Sesquicentennial celebrations fifty years later.

Amidst the tumult of the Great Depression, anxiety about the strength and endurance of national principles colored the Constitution’s 150^th anniversary, and the festivities captured a prevailing nostalgia for early American traditions and culture. Compared to the Centennial, the 1937 commemoration was a more national affair that, in the wake of the New Deal, reflected the federal government’s activist role in national life. Under the leadership of Congressman Sol Bloom (1870-1949), the U.S. Constitution Sesquicentennial Commission gave scant attention to Philadelphia, choosing to highlight the Constitution’s history and meaning rather than the place it was crafted. Centered in Washington, D.C., festivities were to begin on September 17, 1937, with commemorations of key dates and events following throughout the country until April 30, 1939, the anniversary of President Washington’s inauguration.

To the Commission’s dismay, Philadelphia disregarded the national plan and began its festivities on May 14, the date the Constitutional Convention convened in the city. The proceedings commenced at Independence Hall, where teachers gathered dressed as the fifty-five delegates and Mayor S. Davis Wilson (1881-1939) struck the Liberty Bell thirteen times with a wooden gavel made from a tree at Valley Forge. Over the next four months, local interest and pride in Philadelphia’s Constitutional legacy was evident in festivities staged throughout the city, including a Mummers parade on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and a water carnival on the Schuylkill featuring speedboat races, fireworks, and a floating reenactment of the signing of the Constitution. The Pennsylvania Constitution Commemoration Committee also organized school programs and essay contests that stressed Independence Hall’s connection to the Constitution, a bond reinforced by ceremonies held there on June 20, 1938, to mark Pennsylvania’s ratification of the document.

Building Toward Bicentennial

Like the Sesquicentennial, the Constitution’s Bicentennial anniversary in 1987 was also a nationwide, ongoing celebration in which Philadelphia’s festivities were one among many.  Once again, a lack of national planning and funding plagued the proceedings, which nonetheless featured a calendar of observances that built momentum to the Bicentennial itself.  In Philadelphia, the coordinating committee “We the People-200” identified key themes for programming, including the Constitution’s evolution, Philadelphia’s legacy as the first national city, and the growth of the nation.  Through exhibitions, tours, and historic dramas, organizers sought to underscore how historic sites like Independence Hall and the Second Bank of the United States created an enduring connection between Philadelphia and Constitutional history.

Philadelphia’s Bicentennial celebrations officially commenced on Memorial Day weekend 1987 with a festival of events titled “All Roads Lead to Philadelphia.”  At Independence Hall, descendants of the Constitution’s signers greeted representatives from the original thirteen states and attendees included Vice President George H.W. Bush (1924-2018), Chief Justice Warren Burger (1907-1995), and Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey (1932-2000).  Commemorations continued throughout the summer, and on September 17 President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) addressed the nation from Independence Hall following a re-enactment of the 1788 Grand Federal Procession celebrating ratification.  The parade, which marched to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, also included a 40-foot float modeled after a parchment scroll.  A massive public picnic and fireworks at Penn’s Landing concluded the day’s events.

In comparison to earlier anniversaries, the Bicentennial celebrations placed greater emphasis on the Constitution’s evolution, including the progress of African Americans and women. In Philadelphia, however, the Constitutional Convention remained at the forefront, allowing the city to briefly reclaim its mantle as the preeminent American city. The Constitution Heritage Act of 1988 likewise affirmed the city’s Constitutional legacy, authorizing creation of a National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The Center, which broke ground at 525 Arch Street on September 17, 2000, and opened to the public on July 4, 2003, aspires to increase public understanding of the history and ideas of the Constitution, a purpose that likewise pervaded each commemoration of the Constitution’s major anniversaries.

Hillary S. Kativa received her B.A. in History and English from Dickinson College ’05 and her M.A. in History from Villanova University ’08.  Her research interests include American political history and presidential campaigns, public history, and digital humanities. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphia’s was not the first federal procession in 1788. The ceremonial template had been set in Boston (on February 8), Baltimore (May 1), and Charleston (May 27), where shipbuilding craftsmen celebrated their states’ ratifications of the Constitution with processions that put artisans at their center and featured a “Federal Ship” pulled by horses through the streets. While ratification was celebrated around the country, federal processions occurred in urban seaports where artisans had become allied with federalist merchants after years of economic adversity caused by the recession that followed the Revolution. The processions communicated an expectation shared by urban artisans and merchant-capitalists alike, that the Constitution would “lift all boats” by reviving trade and stabilizing financial instruments (such as debt financing and banking) degraded by a lethargic economy under the Articles of Confederation.

In Philadelphia, however, the goal was to seize the political and national center for the city with a “Grand” Procession on the Fourth of July that would supersede all the rest. Taking place after the Constitution had reached the necessary ratification by nine states, supporters sought to demonstrate that the national superstructure had been flat under the Articles of Confederation; the federal Union would be a “grand federal edifice,” raised from the center to more elevated and stable height.  The “old boat” was unsound. A new ship of state, raised in Philadelphia’s shipyards, would succeed in global commerce.

The Order of March

The procession opened by linking federalism with colonial settlement, as twelve “axe-men” in costume clearing the road for “civilization” and for the parade itself. Federalist gentlemen followed, with silk flags marking key dates (1776, 1783, 1787) recalling the nation’s historical birth in war, accompanied by nine corps of infantry and cavalry demonstrating the police power of city troops. Then, the “Constitution” rolled into view in the form of an American eagle, thirteen feet high, pulled by six horses, with a replica of the text signed in gold by “the people.” Next came the “grand federal edifice,” or “new roof.” A neoclassical temple, thirty-six feet in height and supported by thirteen columns, it epitomized the federalist ideal of an elevated center raised by and over “the people.”

While the first half of the Grand Federal Procession featured allegorical floats and military troops, the second half was an extended pun on collective nation-making, with seventeen of some forty-five trades literally producing their respective commodities on horse-drawn stages, occasionally tossing objects (such as printed poems and baked bread) into the crowd. The joke was obvious. In a mass spectacle of American manufacturing, Philadelphia’s procession associated national assembly and political representation with the assembly and consumption of commodities. The shipbuilding crafts (mast makers, caulkers, sail makers, and carpenters) walked at the head of the trades with the Federal Ship Union, mounted with twenty guns. As the single most theatrical float of the day, the ship was noisy, inclusive, and large, with a sheet of blue canvas to simulate water and conceal wheels and machinery below. Commanding great applause, it functioned as a stage upon which a crew of twenty-five, including four young boys in costume, performed “sea ceremonies” such as  “calling anchor” and “trimming sails to the wind” whenever the ship turned a street corner.

The majority of craftsmen walked in the street. Journeymen and apprentice rope makers followed masters with spinning tools (“clouts”) in hand. Coach painters carried palettes. Bricklayers marched with trowels, their flag representing a “Federal city rising” beneath a rising sun, with the motto “both buildings and rulers are the works of our hands.” Three hundred shoemakers in white aprons walked with a horse-drawn shop with six men making shoes. Hundreds of blacksmiths, tinsmiths, and nailers accompanied a working forge, drawn by nine horses, where they turned “old swords” into “plough-irons,” forged pliers, and sold nails along the route. Their motto: “By hammer in hand, all arts do stand.”

Conflicts Beneath the Surface

Despite the air of celebration, connections among American industry, settler colonialism, and state violence were never far from the surface. The United States was already fitfully at war with Shawnee, Wyandot, Delaware, and Haudenosaunee of the interior, who resisted white settler expansion beyond the Ohio River. In the Grand Federal Procession, the gunsmiths followed the biscuit bakers on a horse-drawn stage dubbed the “federal armory.” And near the end of the procession the famous armorer Daniel King (1731-1806) directed a brass-founder’s float, with furnace in full blast.  King’s howitzers had helped to win the Revolutionary War, and he contributed a three-inch howitzer for firing at the procession’s closing ceremonies on Bush Hill, dubbed “Union Green.” Eventually, King howitzers would be sent to the Ohio Valley, where they furnished forts in the federalist struggle to keep Indian resistance at bay, hundreds of miles west of Philadelphia.

Details about the Grand Federal Procession come almost entirely from federalist print publicity: an “Account” by Francis Hopkinson (1737-91), chair of the organizing committee, and “Observations” by physician Benjamin Rush (1746-1813). According to Hopkinson, only six women rode in the parade, all of them on a float loaded with machinery for textile production. One unidentified woman ran the spinning jenny, while five others—the daughters and wife of calico printer John Hewson (1744-1821)—worked at “penciling a piece of very neat sprigg’d chintz of Mr Hewson’s design.” Women also provided invisible labor behind the procession. Sally Bache (1743-1808), daughter of Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), created the “flesh-coloured” costume, blue cap, sash and feather wings worn by actor John Durang (1768-1822) on the printer’s float. There, in the character of the god Mercury, he tossed copies of an ode written by Hopkinson, outlining the federalist fantasy of a global stage on which “an empire rises” before the eyes of a watching (and reading) world.

Oh for a muse of fire !  to mount

     The skies,

And to a list’ning world proclaim –

     Behold! Behold! An empire rise!

    An era new, Time as he flies,

Hath enter’d in the book of Fame.

As a celebration of productivity the Federal Procession (like the Constitution itself) implicitly raised while sidestepping the fact of slavery. In a single, oblique reference to race, Rush cited “king cotton” and celebrated textile manufacturing as a site of national integration, uniting slave labor in the southern states with wage workers in the north. “COTTON,” Rush enthused, “may be cultivated in the southern, and manufactured in the eastern and middle states… Hence will rise a bond of union to the states, more powerful than any article of the New Constitution.”

The Constitution had been sharply contested. Pennsylvania had ratified it by a vote of only 46 to 23. By taking the streets for federalism, the Grand Federal Procession made ratification seem inevitable and popular. At parade’s end, marchers and spectators converged on the lawn of Bush Hill, the estate of William Hamilton (1745-1813) in the vicinity of Seventeenth Street and Fairmount Avenue, Philadelphia, for a citywide feast that consumed 4,000 pounds of beef, 2,600 pounds of ham, and 1,000 barrels of strong beer. In an open-air spectacle, at once solemn ceremony and mass entertainment, thousands of Philadelphians who were not actually present at the writing or ratification of the Constitution found themselves assembled as “the people,” by a grand federal act of framing, forging, and fabrication.

Laura Rigal is Associate Professor in the Departments of English and American Studies at the University of Iowa.  She is the author of The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton University Press, 1998). (Author information current at time of publication.)

Created by California State University Professor Maulana Karenga (b. 1941) in 1966, Kwanzaa is a nonreligious holiday that originates from the Swahili phrase “matunda ya kwanzaa,” meaning “first fruits of the harvest.” The holiday is fashioned to represent the various harvest festivals that take place in many African communities and is rooted in a tradition that extends back to ancient Egyptian civilization. Kwanzaa is celebrated from December 26 to January 1 with each day focusing on one of seven principles that make up the Nguzo Saba—Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination), Ujima (collective work and responsibility), Ujamaa (cooperative economics), Nia (purpose), Kuumba (creativity), and Imani (faith). While no official statistics exist, Karenga has estimated that Kwanzaa is celebrated by up to twenty-eight million people around the world.

Celebration of Kwanzaa in Philadelphia began as early as 1968, when Falaka Fattah (b. 1931) and her husband, David Fattah (b.1943), cofounded a group home for troubled African American males called the House of Umoja. This grassroots project, named after the first principle of Kwanzaa, incorporated all seven principles in daily operations as a methodology for ending gang wars in Philadelphia. The House also held an annual Kwanzaa celebration in conjunction with its anniversary. In 1969, the Urban Survival Training Institute organized one of the first large community Kwanzaa celebrations in Philadelphia. During the 1970s several cooperative groups–including the Camden Kwanzaa Committee, the Kwanzaa Planning Committee, and the Kwanzaa Cooperative–formed to organize Kwanzaa celebrations in the greater Philadelphia region.

Reginald Mtumishi (1945-2009), cofounder and chairman of the Kwanzaa Cooperative, was also an early celebrant of Kwanzaa who influenced its proliferation in Philadelphia. A student and friend of Maulana Karenga, Mtumishi brought the Kwanzaa creator to Philadelphia each year to be the keynote speaker for one of the many events he organized during the week of Kwanzaa. Additionally, Mtumishi introduced the holiday to the Philadelphia Department of Human Services and organized celebrations at the Free Library of Philadelphia each year, contributing greatly to the local growth and acceptance of the holiday.

Philadelphia area residents have been influential in promoting the principles and celebration of Kwanzaa both locally and internationally. In 1980 Baba Abiodun (also known as Phillip Harris, b. 1937) produced the award-winning film Kwanzaa: The Gathering of a People, one of the first major documentaries on Kwanzaa. Baba Abiodun also served as chair of the Kwanzaa Planning Committee from 1971-74 and performed as a griot (storyteller) at many Kwanzaa and African cultural events with the nationally acclaimed Universal African Dance and Drum Ensemble, founded at the Unity Community Center in Camden, New Jersey, by Robert Dickerson (b. 1954) and his wife, Wanda. (b. 1957). For years, the Dickersons and their ensemble participated in Reginald Mtumishi’s Kwanzaa celebrations in Philadelphia. Following Mtumishi’s death in 2009, the Dickersons took over hosting the yearly celebration that featured the ensemble and Maulana Karenga.

While many people celebrate Kwanzaa at home with family, communal celebrating also has been emphasized. Each December, pre-Kwanzaa activities held by civic, community, religious, and education organizations have included workshops, forums, bazaars, and instructional candle lighting ceremonies to educate the community about how to celebrate Kwanzaa, provide opportunities to purchase Kwanzaa-related items, and spread information about Kwanzaa events. Celebrations have included dance drum exhibits and workshops, arts and crafts, candle-lighting ceremonies, art exhibits, storytelling, and spoken word and poetry readings.

Beginning in 1986, the African American Studies Department at Temple University hosted an annual Kwanzaa celebration for its students and the Philadelphia community. Molefi Kete Asante (b. 1942), chair of the department and founder of the first doctoral program in the field of Black Studies, also began an annual Kwanzaa celebration at the MKA Institute (an African think tank and nonprofit public policy organization) in conjunction with the Philadelphia chapter of Afrocentricity International. Asante’s son, M.K. Asante (b. 1982), directed the award-winning Kwanzaa documentary The Black Candle, narrated by Maya Angelou (1928-2014).

In 2013, Oshunbumi Fernandez (b. 1974), lead organizer of Philadelphia’s annual Odunde festival, collaborated with celebrated music producer Kenny Gamble (b. 1943) to start Kwanzaabration—a community event that aimed to educate children and adults about Kwanzaa and to foster a yearlong celebration of the principles of Kwanzaa. The project carried on the goals of Kwanzaa’s founders to demonstrate and defend the cultural unity of Africans both on the continent and throughout the diaspora.

Christina Afia Harris is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Africology and African American Studies at Temple University. This essay is derived from her research and her personal experience celebrating Kwanzaa. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The first celebration of Labor Day occurred in New York City on September 5, 1882, when an estimated 10,000 garment workers held a parade that ended in a picnic with labor-oriented speeches and family activities. The success of the first Labor Day led New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and other states to adopt similar celebrations and create legislated holidays. An act of Congress on June 28, 1894, made Labor Day a federal holiday. Two New York labor activists, Peter J. McGuire (1852-1906) of the American Federation of Labor and Matthew Maguire (1855-1917) of the Knights of Labor, both have been credited with the idea of making Labor Day a national observance.

In the Philadelphia area, Labor Day followed the pattern of the original observance in New York, with parades to show the solidarity of the workers followed by festivals for workers and their families. Dominated at first by the region’s textile unions, Labor Day attracted additional workers as the labor movement grew in prominence and the size of the parades and number of participants grew. In 1900, the region’s Labor Day celebration included 15,000 people from various ethnic and labor backgrounds celebrating together at Washington Park on the Delaware River in Gloucester, New Jersey.  For several years, however, harmony among labor unions broke down and Philadelphia had two parades as workers became divided over supporting or opposing socialist parties.

Early Labor Day celebrations honored those who worked, but they also showed the power of the unions as they sought an advantage in negotiations over hours and wages. In 1905, the forces of labor reunited for a single parade of 30,000 laborers to show solidarity as most wage agreements were due to expire in May of the next year. The parade assembled at Broad Street and Girard Avenue and marched down Broad to Christian, then marched back into the city to Chestnut, to Delaware Avenue, to Arch Street, where the laborers took the Arch Street Ferry to Washington Park for family celebrations. While the parade was a key feature in this and other years, speeches by labor officials and politicians after the parades called attention to the condition of workers before unionization and focused on the civic and economic values behind the holiday.

In the early twentieth century, Labor Day changed as the growth of public transportation systems and automobile ownership allowed many city-dwellers to travel over the holiday weekend. Trips to the beaches of southern New Jersey became a tradition of Labor Day celebrations in the area. In 1914, for example, Atlantic City expected 50,000 or more Philadelphians to make the trip to the shore.

Labor Day also changed with transitions in the industrial economy. Celebrations were low-key and quiet during the Great Depression, even though membership in labor unions grew. With the economy fragile and the availability of work limited, workers did not want to risk their jobs. With the start of World War II, industry boomed and the economy recovered, and Labor Day returned to its pre-Depression style of celebration. Southern New Jersey beaches continued to be popular destinations with attractions for the entire family. The Labor Day parade remained a staple of the holiday but changed in scope to become more patriotic and family-oriented while still showing worker solidarity. Labor Day also changed significantly as the Philadelphia region shifted from production to the service economy, which meant fewer manufacturing jobs but a growing prominence of unions representing government employees, teachers, and others in the public and service sector.

The ideas of workers’ rights and solidarity associated with the first Labor Day celebrations continued to resonate with some, but as the Philadelphia area suburbanized, Labor Day celebrations became smaller and dispersed through many small towns. Big city parades, whether in Philadelphia or Wilmington, Delaware, did not attract as much attention.  The holiday became associated more with commercial sales and end-of-summer rituals than with the interests of labor. During election years, it also signaled the kick-off of political campaigning as candidates participated in Labor Day events to connect with voters. Beginning in 2012, the Made in America music festival on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway became a hallmark event of Labor Day weekend in Philadelphia. Although union rallies continued to occur, the view of Labor Day as an extended weekend to be spent with family or on the beach remained a mainstay in the region.

Scott Hearn earned his master’s degree in history at Rutgers-Camden. (Author information current at time of publication.)

When the Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), a French hero of the American Revolution, returned to the United States in 1824-25, Philadelphians joined in a wave of nationwide affection for the nobleman who had volunteered for service in the Continental Army at the age of 19. Lafayette’s return to the region stirred increasing regard for preserving relics of the Revolution, especially the old Pennsylvania State House, which began to acquire a new name: Independence Hall.

Lafayette (Marie Joseph Paul Yyves Roch Gilbert de Motier, Marquis de Lafayette) returned to the United States as the “nation’s guest” by invitation of his longtime friend President James Monroe (1758-1831). With the Declaration of Independence nearly fifty years in the past, Lafayette represented a generation of heroes soon to pass from living history into memory. Throughout the United States, his presence touched off elaborate preparations, pageantry, and a lively market for Lafayette keepsakes. The tour, originally intended to last four months, triggered such intense public enthusiasm that Lafayette stayed for thirteen months and traveled to all twenty-four states in the nation. He visited Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) at Monticello and the Mount Vernon tomb of his general and friend George Washington (1732-99).

Lafayette came to the Philadelphia region twice, near the beginning and end of his tour. In September 1824, after arriving in New York from France, he journeyed through northern New Jersey to Trenton, where he crossed the covered bridge over the Delaware River to Morrisville, Pennsylvania. Entertained at an evening ball at Holmesburg and then lodged overnight at the Frankford Arsenal, the next day Lafayette entered Philadelphia in a carriage pulled by six cream-colored horses and accompanied by a three-mile-long procession of citizens on horseback, public officials from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, military units, veterans of the Revolution, tradesmen, and farmers from the countryside. The parade followed a route carefully planned to pass impressive neighborhoods and landmarks and cheering throngs of onlookers on the way to the old State House. Temporary triumphal arches along the route ushered the marchers and riders through Northern Liberties into the city.

For nearly two months, Philadelphians had planned for the moment of Lafayette’s arrival. For his reception, an arrangements committee commissioned architect William Strickland (1788-1854) to refurbish the room in the old State House where independence had been declared. By that time in a state of neglect, the east room on the building’s first floor attracted renewed attention as it became transformed for the occasion. As Philadelphians acquired new mahogany chairs and sofas, draperies, and carpets to create a suitably lavish reception, they also coined a name for the room: the “Hall of Independence” or “Independence Hall.” Originally applied only to the first-floor room where independence had been declared, over subsequent decades the name became applied to the building as a whole.

Lafayette’s reception in the Hall of Independence, during which he and Philadelphia’s mayor exchanged greetings and reflected on the historic events that transpired where they stood, established a precedent for other nineteenth-century guests, from dignitaries to visiting fire companies. Lafayette’s eight-day visit also created new attachments to the memory of the American Revolution for thousands of schoolchildren who assembled in the State House Yard to be in his presence, for residents who attended a celebratory civic ball at the Chestnut Street Theatre, and for those who adorned themselves and their homes with mass-produced souvenirs. “Everything is Lafayette, whether it be on our heads or under our feet,” the Saturday Evening Post commented in the aftermath. “We wrap our bodies in Lafayette coats during the day, and repose between Lafayette blankets at night.”

Departing Philadelphia, Lafayette traveled by steamboat on the Delaware River to Chester, Pennsylvania, which celebrated him with a parade and banquet, and from there to Wilmington, Delaware. When he returned to the region for a somewhat longer, but quieter, stay near the end of his tour in July 1825, his itinerary included visits to Germantown, Mount Airy, and Chestnut Hill. On the way south for departure from Washington, he stopped in West Chester (where an estimated ten thousand people gathered to witness his procession) and joined military units and aged veterans in a tour of the area of the Battle of Brandywine, where he had been wounded during the Philadelphia campaign.

Lafayette’s tour left lasting effects around the United States in the form of towns, counties, colleges, and streets bearing his name, projects to create monuments, and new regard for material relics of the American Revolution. In Philadelphia, historically-minded citizens formed the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1824. Some who served on the arrangements committee for Lafayette’s visit mobilized again 1828 to replace the steeple on Independence Hall, which had lacked this distinctive feature since the original rotted away more than four decades before. The new steeple served contemporary needs for a clock and bell, but the Philadelphia City Councils insisted that it must resemble as closely as possible the building as it stood at the time of the American Revolution.

Charlene Mires is Professor of History at Rutgers-Camden and Editor-in-Chief of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Interest in honoring King’s legacy grew after his 1968 assassination, and annual observances of his date of birth (January 15) began in Atlanta and elsewhere. Pennsylvania Governor Milton J. Shapp (1912-94) signed a state King Holiday into law in 1978, and New Jersey declared a state holiday the same year. Delaware Governor Pierre Samuel Du Pont (b.1935) designated a state holiday in 1984. Public pressure also persuaded Congress to pass federal King holiday legislation, which President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) signed on November 2, 1983. Commemorating King’s birthday as a federal holiday beginning in 1986, the day was dedicated to reflecting on “racial equality and nonviolent social change.” Intended for all Americans, not only African Americans, King Day nonetheless fulfilled a long held desire for a national Black holiday.

Philadelphia’s role in the observance grew after the first holiday, which was criticized by civil rights activists as superficial and overly reliant on King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Seeking to make the day more substantial, the King Federal Holiday Commission chaired by King’s widow Coretta Scott King (1927-2006) looked to Philadelphia for inspiration and used the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution to invoke King’s legacy. The Liberty Bell, with its associations to independence and abolition, became a holiday icon; ringing the bell, and replicas in every state, became a tradition from 1987. Some who gently tapped the bell in Philadelphia included Rosa Parks (1988), Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP (1989), James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (1990), Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women (1992), Vice President Albert Gore (1995), and General Colin Powell (1996). King himself had laid a wreath at the bell in 1959 on National Freedom Day to commemorate the Thirteenth Amendment.

Day of Tribute—and Protest

On King Day, traditions in the Philadelphia region have included ecumenical prayer services, songs, speeches, and acts of community service. Banks, public schools, and state and federal agencies close. The holiday has also been used to protest social and political conditions. Over the years, Congressman William H. Gray III (1941-2013) denounced apartheid in South Africa, the Philadelphia-Delaware Valley Union of the Homeless claimed an abandoned house in Southwest Philadelphia, and sanitation workers demonstrated against their employment conditions. C. Delores Tucker (1927-2005), president of the Philadelphia MLK Association for Nonviolence, also led a protest outside Tower Records to condemn misogynist lyrics in rap music.

Philadelphia again influenced the national holiday in 1994 when U.S. Senator Harris Wofford (b. 1926) of Pennsylvania persuaded Congress to convert the holiday to a day of community service. Wofford had worked as a civil rights adviser to President John F. Kennedy and led the Peace Corps, an inspiration for the service initiative. Wofford highlighted Philadelphia’s existing community service events and with Coretta Scott King’s support he and Congressman John Lewis (b. 1940), a civil rights movement veteran, sought to transform the day into an “active living tribute” to King. They wanted “to remember Martin the way he would have liked” with “action, not apathy.” On August 23, 1994, President Bill Clinton (b. 1946) signed the King Holiday and Service Act, establishing the day of service.

In Greater Philadelphia, service activities on Martin Luther King Day have been centered at Girard College, where King spoke before 5,000 at an integration rally in 1965. Activities have been coordinated by MLK 365, a project of the Philadelphia-based nonprofit organization Global Citizen. MLK 365 seeks to promote volunteerism not only on the holiday, but year-round, and hosts discussions on race, class and power.

The 2015 King holiday in Philadelphia encompassed protest as well as commemoration. A large rally marching up Broad Street to City Hall and on to Independence Hall marked Martin Luther King Day as a “Day of Action, Resistance, and Empowerment” against economic inequality and police brutality. Following several high profile deaths of Black men in other cities at the hands of police, this protest attempted to reclaim King’s activism and pointed to a potentially contentious future for the holiday as a new generation of King legatees sought to protest as well as to serve.

Daniel Thomas Fleming is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author of “Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.” in Agora, Vol 46, No 1, 2011 and “Marvin Gaye, Martin Luther King and the FBI” in Traffic, Vol 9, 2007. He has presented his research at conferences of the Organization of American Historians and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. (Author information current at time of publication.)