In September 1941 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called his friend Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter to the White House and told him: “If any memorial is erected to me, I know exactly what I should like it to be. I should like it to consist of a block about the size of this (putting his hand on his desk) and placed in the center of that green plot in front of the Archives Building. I don’t care what it is made of, whether limestone or granite or whatnot. But I want it plain without ornamentation, with the simple carving, ‘In memory of __________ ‘”. On April 25, 1965, the twentieth anniversary of FDR’s death, a small group of his friends and colleagues gathered to dedicate this modest memorial to FDR’s memory and lasting legacy.
