At the Smithsonian Zoo, ‘Easter Monday’ tradition lives on with changes

The National Zoo has been the Easter Monday destination for many black families for more than a century — a tradition that has undergone a modern update.

“It’s become a tradition of families to come to the zoo, all kinds of families,” zoo spokeswoman Annalisa Meyer said Monday amid a festival featuring food, live music and egg hunts at Lion & Tiger Hill.

The zoo’s Easter Monday festival has attracted scores of families from all over the region — and many tourists, as well. Last year, 13,480 people attended the zoo’s holiday festivities, Ms. Meyer said.

One family arrived early Monday with three generations ready to celebrate together.

“It started when I was younger and it kept going when they were younger and now with the grandbabies,” said Keona Royal, a grandmother of two from Waldorf, Maryland. “I just kept it going.”

For Ms. Royal, who grew up going to the zoo with her grandparents, Easter Monday was just as important to her family as Easter Sunday.

“My family would cook Easter dinner but the celebration was always Monday,” she said.

Annazett Goddard, 54, of Southeast, said she used to ride her bike to the zoo with her family on Easter Mondays every year until she was 16.

Now she works at the zoo in food service and says seeing the children on Easter Monday brings back memories.

“We used to picnic underneath the little bridge and catch little tadpoles and bring our own little jars to bring them home and put them in a fish tank,” said Ms. Goddard. “Then we’d come up here [to the zoo] and get the little snacks — cotton candy and the popcorn. It was just fun.”

Ms. Royal said she has noticed some changes at the zoo since her youth, such as the removal of open grills for family cookouts and the introduction of exhibits aimed at educating kids about wildlife. The last decade also has seen the addition of the “Easter Panda,” which has become an icon of the festival.

For 127 years black families in the greater Washington region celebrated the day after Easter at the zoo, though the origins of the event remain a mystery. Several origin stories center on the idea that black families had to create a time and place of their own to celebrate the holiday.

“Somebody told me it started back in the days after slavery, where they always had to cook for the house and that was on Sunday, so they had their Easter on Monday,” Ms. Royal said.

Some oral histories say that black families were not welcome at the District’s other big Easter event — the White House Easter egg roll, which started in 1878.

“I saw an article stating that it first started with the local African-American families that were living here at the time and they weren’t allowed to go to the White House,” said Mary Anin-Mensah, 34, a Houston transplant now living in Southeast who attended the zoo’s Easter Monday event for the first time with her 2-year-old son, Benjamin.

Ms. Meyer said that zoo officials don’t even know the details about how and why the celebration was organized, other than it began in 1891.

But the Library of Congress possesses at least two historical photos show black children at the White House Easter egg roll in 1891. Historians say, however, true integration didn’t occur until the 1950s, when first lady Mamie Eisenhower reinstated the Easter egg roll after the tradition had been suspended during World War II.

“Mamie Eisenhower asked why black children were looking through the gates at the white children rolling eggs inside,” Elizabeth Bumiller wrote in an article for The New York Times in 2006.

Since then the Easter egg roll has grown to become one of the largest public events at the White House, and Easter Monday continues to welcome more families to its tradition.