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Things to do in DC on Memorial Day weekend 2019

By Jennifer Ortiz

The D.C. area will host many events and opportunities to honor fallen military members throughout Memorial Day weekend. Here’s what you need to know.

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National Memorial Day Concert

It’s an American tradition dating back to 1989 that brings in various talent to the stage on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol to honor the nation’s fallen soldiers.

This year’s performers include Patti LaBelle, Gavin DeGraw, Justin Moore and Alison Kraus, to name a few.

Patti LaBelle, Alison Krauss, Gavin DeGraw headline Memorial Day Concert

Tickets are not needed to watch the concert live on the lawn. The gates to enter — located on the southwest corner of the Capitol grounds — open at 5 p.m. and the public will not be admitted to the West Lawn before then. The concert begins at 8 p.m.

At the Saturday dress rehearsal for the concert, Executive Producer of the event Michael Colbert told WTOP the concert is an hour and a half dedicated to showing appreciation toward servicemen and women.

“We want to honor, to remember, to let our military, our veterans, their families, let them know — ‘hey, we love you,’” said Executive Producer of the concert Michael Colbert.

This year’s concert will feature a guest star.

“This year’s Academy Award nominee, Sam Elliott, is here and he’s going to tell the story of Sergeant Ray Lambert, a medic,” Colbert said. Sgt. Lambert landed on Omaha Beach and was shot twice.

“Glee” star Amber Riley will perform “I’ll Stand By You”. Patty LaBelle will close out this year’s concert with a rendition of Mariah Cary’s song “Hero” in honor of all military families.

Public entrances to the concert are:

  • On the north (Senate) side of Capitol Square on Third Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
  • On the south (House) side of Capitol Square on Third Street and Maryland Avenue, SW

All bags will be checked at the various checkpoints. The following items are prohibited:

  • Alcoholic Beverages
  • Glass Bottles
  • Animals (other than service animals)
  • Bicycles
  • Firearms and Ammunition (either real or simulated)
  • Explosives of any kind (including Fireworks)
  • Knives, Blades or Sharp Objects (of any length)
  • Laser Pointers, Signs, Posters
  • Mace, Pepper Spray, Sticks, Poles
  • Electric Stun Guns
  • Martial Arts Weapons or devices
  • Umbrellas larger 36” in diameter (those smaller than 36” will be allowed)
  • Pocket or Hand Tools such as a “Leatherman”
  • Sealed Packages, Large boxes, Duffel bags, Suitcases
  • Drones, Model rockets, Remote or Manually-controlled Model Gliders, Model Airplanes or Unmanned Aircrafts, Model Boats and/or Cars, and other unmanned ground or aircraft systems

Temporary street closures will take effect beginning at 12:01 a.m. on Friday, May 25 through Monday, May 28 at 4 a.m.

  • First Street, SW/NW from Independence Avenue to Constitution Avenue
  • Maryland Avenue, SW, from First Street to Third Street
  • Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, from First Street to Third Street

If you can’t make it to the concert in person or want to avoid all the traffic and people, tune in to the live broadcast on your local PBS station.

Memorial Day Parade

It’s the nation’s largest Memorial Day event, drawing thousands of spectators along Constitution Avenue. The National Memorial Day Parade marks its 15th year and honors all members of the military, especially those who died during service.

The American Veterans Center describes the event as a moving timeline of American history that draws on traditions from past Memorial Day parades, going back to the beginning of the holiday just after the Civil War.

This year’s grand marshals and special celebrity guests include the heroes of D-Day, “Criminal Minds” star Joe Mantegna and celebrity chef Robert Irvine as well as musical performances by Justin Moore, Quaid & James, Kiefer Sutherland, the winner of “The Voice” and The USO Show Troupe.

The parade kicks off at 2 p.m. and goes along Constitution Avenue, Northwest from 7th to 17th street.

The best place to watch is anywhere along the parade route, but the American Veterans Center said the steps of the National Archives provide a great view. The National Archives/Penn Quarter/Navy Memorial stops on the Green and Yellow lines are one block away from the parade route. Those who can’ make it out to the parade can also tune into a livestream on YouTube.

National Memorial Day Parade 2019 road closures

Poppy Wall of Honor

It’ll be impossible to miss the 133-foot long, 8 1/2-foot-tall wall quickly filling with thousands of vibrant red poppies on the National Mall this Memorial Day weekend.

The poppies — approximately 645,000 of them — are meant to represent the American servicemen and women who have given their lives since World War I. The USAA Poppy Wall of Honor this year will also commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

The wall will be on the southwest side of the Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Korean War Memorial — the Reflecting Pool due north, and the World War II Memorial to the East.

It will be open for visitors from Friday, May 24 through Sunday, May 26.

Last Rolling Thunder

A tradition for the last 31 years comes to an end this Memorial Day. The Rolling Thunder Ride for Freedom, will do one final bike ride throughout D.C. The motorcycle ride first started as a demonstration to advocate for prisoners of war and those who are missing in action.

The Rolling Thunder XXXII First Amendment Demonstration Run will kick off at noon on Sunday, May 26, as bikes take off from the North Pentagon parking lot and ride their way through the Mall area. Riders will pay tribute to their fallen military service members at West Potomac Park after the ride.

Road closures for Rolling Thunder

 

Alexandria’s Memorial Day Jazz Festival 

Alexandria’s 42nd annual festival will take place from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Monday, May 27 at Waterfront Park. The event, which highlights the diverse style of jazz, is free and open to the public.

The U.S. Army Blues will kick it off with big band jazz at 1 p.m. VERONNEAU, with global jazz music, will continue at 2:30 p.m. Contemporary jazz musicians Dave Kline Band will take the stage at 3:30 p.m. and big band swing jazz band Good Shot Judy will be the final act at 4:30 p.m.

The Waterfront Park has lawn seating and those attending the festival can bring lawn chairs, blankets and picnic baskets. Food is available for purchase. Grilling, pets and alcohol are not allowed.

If it rains, the festival will be relocated to the Lee Center Kauffman Auditorium.

Viva! Vienna! 

From Saturday through Monday, Vienna will be packed with fun activities for the family.

The Memorial Day festivities kick off every day at 10 a.m. There will be amusement rides, vendors, carnival food and live music until 10 p.m.

WTOP’s Melissa Howell contributed to this report.

Pete Buttigieg returns to first-in-the-nation South Carolina with a fresh appeal to Black voters

By CNN
Orangeburg, South Carolina (CNN) — Pete Buttigieg has been to this small but historic city in South Carolina’s Midlands at least twice before, as an underdog presidential candidate in 2020 and then as the better-known transportation secretary under President Joe Biden in 2023.Now a private citizen eying a second White House bid, Buttigieg returned this weekend with renewed urgency, appealing to Black voters who have newly solidified influence in the 2028 nominating process and whom he failed to win over in his last presidential campaign.Buttigieg told party activists during a morning speech in Florence that Republicans were using redistricting as “the culmination of a generational project to dismantle Black representation.” He held a roundtable with students at a historically Black college where he discussed his idea of reparations for slavery. And during an evening speech to the storied NAACP branch here, he said President Donald Trump’s second term may feel all too familiar to activists who fought for civil rights in Orangeburg in the 1960s.“The mid-2020s does not represent our nation’s first experience with corruption and self-dealing, with bigotry and exclusion, with inequality and injustice, with undemocratic behavior or with political violence,” Buttigieg said, adding that prior struggles played out “not on some distant shore, but in places like Orangeburg.”With a midterm election looming where both parties are campaigning over the cost of living, Buttigieg chastised fellow Democrats whom he said prefer to prioritize economic concerns over tackling more fundamental questions about democracy. He argued that civil rights legends such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Jesse Jackson have shown that Americans “can — and we must — do both.”His trip to South Carolina, Buttigieg’s first since leaving the Biden administration, marked the beginning of a new phase of political maneuvering ahead of the next presidential election, with Buttigieg making a concerted effort to get in front of Black voters and demonstrating new bonafides from his transportation secretary tenure.It was also the first major visit by a potential 2028 candidate to the state since the Democratic National Committee voted on August 15 to keep it as the location for the first presidential primary in the nation, a nod to the political power of its large Black electorate.Buttigieg brushed off a question about his 2028 plans after his speech in Florence, telling reporters he is “totally focused on 2026.” But there were ample reminders of speculation about his next move on Saturday, including a scattering of homemade signs reading “PETE” and “2028” that sprung up when he took the stage. Surveying the enthusiastic crowd, he observed he should “come here more often.”One fan, 64-year-old retiree Karen Ench, wore a “Pete Buttigieg 2028” shirt to the speech. Contemplating his 2028 ambitions afterward, she said she thought he was “really taking it much more serious” and focusing on areas of improvement from 2020.A 2028 bid would undoubtedly start with higher expectations for the onetime mayor of South Bend, Indiana, compared to his first run.“The Pete Buttigieg of 2020 is not the Pete Buttigieg of 2026,” said Marlon Kimpson, a Black former state senator who backed Biden in the 2020 primary. “He has name recognition, he’s no longer introducing himself. I think people generally like Pete, and that’s a big deal in an open race because he starts out at a plus. But as we look at his economic agenda, just for the average South Carolinian, with emphasis on the African American community … and the political infrastructure he has deployed in our state, there will be questions with respect to those issues.”Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign, despite winning the Iowa caucuses with a much Whiter demographic, came to an end in South Carolina, dogged by his weaknesses with Black voters. After powerful South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn endorsed Biden and gave his flagging bid a shot of momentum that ultimately propelled him to the presidency, Buttigieg finished fourth in the Palmetto State and dropped out a day later.Biden received 61% support from Black voters in South Carolina, while Buttigieg got 3%, according to exit polls.Colleen Condon, a Charleston lawyer and longtime party activist who backed Buttigieg in 2020, said that “2020 is so hard to compare against” due to the unique circumstances of Clyburn’s support for Biden. Now, Condon, who is White, said, Democrats are “anxious for someone young and energetic” and noted Buttigieg would bring more experience to the 2028 race.“He has done a lot of work in the last eight years, (including) as secretary of transportation, in showing his ability to work on the federal level,” Condon said.‘What he’s actually done’In interviews across the state on Saturday, Black Democrats agreed Buttigieg’s experience as transportation secretary has distinguished him since he last sought their support. He played a high-profile role in promoting Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law, visiting communities small and large across the country to announce funding for long-awaited projects.In Florence, Mattie Thomas, a member of the South Carolina Democratic Party executive committee, said she did not know about his time as mayor but now she sees him as “one of our best transportation secretaries.”“I think he’ll fare extremely well this go around because people, they’ve seen what he’s actually done,” Sandra Burgess Glover, a retired educator, said in Orangeburg as Buttigieg mingled with the dinner crowd before his speech.Buttigieg was showered with praise at the dinner for his June 2023 announcement in the city with Clyburn of a $23 million federal grant to better connect Orangeburg’s two HBCUs to downtown. Orangeburg Mayor Michael Butler prompted a standing ovation for Buttigieg when he brought up the project, calling it “a long time coming.”Deloris Frazier, a member of the Orangeburg County Council, embraced Buttigieg as he worked the crowd before the dinner, telling him that she keeps a photo in her home of the two of them from that day in 2023. She told CNN afterward that she’d support Buttigieg for president if he ran, joking that she would take the photo and “just blow it up and make it bigger.”Earlier Saturday, Buttigieg visited one of Orangeburg’s HBCUs, Claflin University, and held an hourlong roundtable with about 20 students. The conversation topics ranged from artificial intelligence to reparations for slavery, which was a litmus test in the 2020 primary.Buttigieg said he still supported legislation to create a commission to study reparations. But he said he learned as transportation secretary that the federal government could take “reparative” steps sooner, pointing to his efforts to combat decades-old urban planning that led to highways cutting across Black neighborhoods.“I have a perspective on that that I didn’t have before when I didn’t have a chance to work on federal policy,” Buttigieg said.Usir Jackson, the president of the Student Government Association, said afterward he found Buttigieg “down to earth” and “authentic.”Buttigieg, who took notes at some points, appeared moved when the roundtable topic turned to young voters feeling disillusioned – and Jackson shared why he still makes sure to vote.“I do it to respect people who came before me,” Jackson said, “so I could vote.”Hurdles remain with Black votersFor all the praise of his record in the Biden administration, some of Buttigieg’s admirers acknowledge he needs it to translate into far more Black voter support than he saw in 2020.While the crowd he spoke to in Orangeburg was overwhelmingly Black, the audience that came to see him earlier in the day in Florence, at the state Democratic Party’s Spratt Issues Conference, was mostly White.State Rep. JA Moore was a crucial Black supporter for Buttigieg in 2020 in South Carolina, backing him after then-California Sen. Kamala Harris dropped out. Moore said in an interview that any potential 2028 candidate needs to focus less on tailoring a message to Black voters and more on developing a “cadence” of regularly reaching out to them where they are.“What we call it is the difference between a ‘come here’ and a ‘been here,’” Moore said. “I think one of the things people missed about Joe Biden – he was a ‘been here’ in the sense that he had been coming to South Carolina for over 40 years.”Some Black Democrats said he may continue to face hurdles in the state as a gay man, an issue that came up in 2020 as he reached out to socially conservative church congregations. “This is the Bible Belt,” Thomas said matter-of-factly.“Sometimes they want to categorize a candidate or individual because of their sexual preferences,” said Brenda Montgomery, a 67-year-old training specialist from Lake City who saw Buttigieg in Florence. “But for me, he is everyone. He represents everyone, and I really like him as a person because he is approachable.”Buttigieg, whose crowd in Florence was dotted with some small rainbow flags, does not go out of his way to talk about his sexual orientation. But on Saturday, he spoke regularly about his two children, who are mixed-race, that he adopted with his husband, Chasten, noting fatherhood is the biggest personal change he has experienced since 2020.It’s a life change that would be put to the test by another grueling presidential campaign, which South Carolina Democrats see as likelier than ever. While he mostly avoided talk of 2028, he said in Florence that he was excited about South Carolina’s first-in-the-nation status and how it would spotlight the state’s diversity.Buttigieg has fielded the 2028 speculation by becoming one of the most prolific endorsers in the midterms, with an eye on supporting Black Democrats and Democrats running in Republican-leaning territory. He kicked off his South Carolina trip on Friday night by headlining a fundraiser in Charleston for Nancy Lacore, a retired Navy officer running for an open House seat in a district that Trump carried by 13 percentage points in 2024.Condon, the Democratic activist who helped host Buttigieg’s fundraiser for LaCore, said it was “extremely early, but I’m very inclined to” support Buttigieg again in 2028 if he runs.Moore said it was too early for endorsements but said he especially likes Buttigieg for at least one reason.Buttigieg “has the ability to learn and adapt,” Moore said. “I find that refreshing and appealing.”The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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