Rolling with fun at zoo an Easter Monday rite

Mo Rouse swears he can still feel the knot on his head even though it has been 40 years since the National Zoo’s assistant director of guest services last rolled down Lion/Tiger Hill on an Easter Monday.

“We got to roll, rumble and tumble down that hill,” says Mr. Rouse, who memorably bumped his head on one of those plunges.

“It was a high point of our day, when just about every family you knew would pack up a lunch and come to the zoo.”

A lot of rolling is still going on the Monday after Easter, and we’re not just talking Easter eggs at the White House.

At the National Zoo, the annual African American Family Celebration will have visitors rolling eggs (and maybe a few bodies down Lion/Tiger Hill); grooving to live jazz, drumming and gospel; interacting with storytellers; cheering on a champion double-Dutch team that feeds on audiences’ vocal support as members twirl, twist, hop and turn; and meeting with Smithsonian scientists in a daylong celebration of black American family life that features some of the best musicians, artists and artisans the Washington area has to offer.

This year, the zoo’s celebration has taken on an important new twist, a collaboration with the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture, which was established in part to ensure that memories of the zoo’s Easter Monday celebrations of long ago won’t be overlooked.

Mr. Rouse doesn’t need that reminder. All he has to do is reach up and feel the memory of the knot on his head, and the past comes rushing back.

“This was our day to shine,” says Mr. Rouse, who remembers traveling to the zoo by streetcar from his childhood home on Ames Street Northeast.

“You got your new suit for Easter, and then you looked forward to Easter Monday at the National Zoo.”

A long tradition

The celebration is nearly as old as the zoo itself, which Congress established in 1889. The family event began more than a century ago — some say the early 1890s — as black families gathered to stroll the zoo’s winding paths or picnic on its rolling hills on Easter Monday.

“One of the things I learned when I came to Washington in 1971 was that Easter Monday was special for African Americans in particular,” says Bob Lamb, executive director of Friends of the National Zoo, the nonprofit membership organization that helps support zoo programs.

“It’s a wonderful part of the fabric of what makes Washington Washington.”

Blacks were not actively encouraged to participate in the White House Easter Egg Roll until the Eisenhower administration, when Mamie Eisenhower made a point of including black children in the festivities. During the first part of the 20th century, many black domestics had to work on Easter Sunday, so they couldn’t be with their own families.

“Black Washington was a separate entity from white Washington,” says Lisa Stevens, curator of pandas and primates, who has been with the zoo for 24 years and served on the planning committee when the zoo took over the family day in 1993.

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