March 19, 2015
Prince Charles and Duchess of Cornwall visit 1297 Magna Carta & US memorials
The BBC, 19th March 2015
The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall have visited monuments to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr as part of their trip to the US.
They were joined by figures from the American civil rights movement, Jesse Jackson and Congressman John Lewis.
Later, speaking at an environmental conference, the prince called on governments and businesses to end the dumping of plastics into the oceans.
The couple will meet President Barack Obama at the White House on Thursday.
The couple – who arrived in Washington DC for their three-day visit on Tuesday – were given a guided tour of the Lincoln Memorial sculpture, pausing at the spot where Dr King gave his famous “I have a dream” speech in 1963.
At Dr King’s nearby memorial, they met Rev Jackson and Congressman Lewis, who helped organise the famous civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 – dramatised in the recent movie Selma.
The prince and duchess were also given a tour of Mount Vernon – home of America’s first president, George Washington.
The duchess also paid a visit to Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company.
Prince Charles also visited the National Archives, where he viewed the United States’ Charters of Freedom and the 1297 version of the Magna Carta.
He later told leading delegates to an environmental conference on marine waste of his concerns about the “increasing quantity of plastic waste” in oceans.
He said he had been “haunted” by images of seabirds found dead after mistakenly eating plastic, and called for better recycling and disposal of plastics.
The solution to problems caused by a “throw-away society” was to move towards a circular economy, where “materials are recovered, recycled and reused instead of created, used and then thrown away”, he said.
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