Glenn Beck Rally in Washington D.C.

March 28, 2010

I recently attended the Glenn Beck Tea Party rally held on the mall here in D.C. With the Martin Luther King "I Had A Dream" speech gathering occurring on the capitol end, the mall seemed like a place divided - segregated almost. Like I have done at all the Tea Party rallies I have been to, I conducted a race count. My results are as follows: 31 African Americans, 2 Hispanics, 9 Asians, 6 Middle Easterners, 8 East Indians, 5 unknown, 0 Native American and the rest were white, mostly between the ages of 35 and 65. Mr. Beck estimated the crowd to be 500,000 people but CBS news, using AirPhotosLive.com, estimated the crowd to be closer to 87,000 people. According to Beck's estimate, that means just 0.0122% of the crowd was a race other than white. According to CBS the number is only slightly larger - 0.07%. Although I spent a number of hours navigating the throng, I undoubtedly did not see every non-white person. To account for this, I could calculate that I walked 25% of the grounds for 33% of the rally's 3 hours. This raises the numbers to 0.15% for Beck's crowd estimate and 0.84% for the CBS estimate.