The park has been busy since it was just a hill. A member of the Union Army who camped on the hill during the Civil War described it as “the most delightful locality in the city of Washington.” In 1911, Mary Henderson, who owned a mansion on the hill, petitioned Congress to site the Lincoln Memorial there. She lost that bid but succeeded in getting the area designated as a park. Her vision required the displacement of a number of African Americans in the neighborhood; their homes were razed. Italian landscape architect Ferruccio Vitale and his firm were commissioned to design the park, which features the longest cascading fountain in North America.
During the Civil Rights Movement, the park was often a site of activism. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. often visited it when he came to D.C. The year after his death, Angela Davis called for the park to be renamed Malcolm X Park as a symbol of Black pride. Adam Clayton Powell, a Congressman from New York, introduced legislation to officially change the name, but it never passed, and the debate continues to this day.