“Fighting Bob” La Follette was a fiery politician from Wisconsin who founded The Progressive magazine in 1909.  The Capitol’s statue of antiwar congresswoman  Jeannette Rankin of Montana is appropriately  located near a replica of the statue of Freedom that looks down from the Capitol Dome.

Dr. King and Friends Honored in DC

Washington DC’s new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial is an impressive addition to the city’s scenic Tidal Basin area.  At the Capitol Building, statues of civil rights icons Rosa Parks and Frederick Douglass are on view for visitors. In Washington’s historic Union Station train depot, travelers pass a bronze statue of A. Philip Randolph, a railroad union leader who conceived the 1963 freedom march on Washington where Dr. King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech to a teeming multitude.

American activists are honored in the U.S. Capitol Building’s Statuary Hall. The photo below shows the “Suffragist Stone” depicting early feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton,  Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott.  The other images are of   slavery abolitionist Sojourner Truth and  native American dissident Sarah  Winnemucca, who struggled for human rights for black and red Americans in the 19th Century.