How Many People Were at Glenn Beck's 8/28 Restoring Honor Rally?

On Saturday, August 28, 2010, Glenn Beck hosted the Restoring Honor Rally at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The rally was a non-political and non-partisan event with any and all proceeds going to the Special Operations Warrior Foundation.

Al Sharpton held a counter rally and march dubbed Reclaim the Dream and claimed on his Nation Action Network (NAN) website that Glenn Beck and the Tea Party were attempting to "hijack MLK's dream;" more on that here.

Some of the controversy was about the crowd size.

How many attended Sharpton's rally?

On Sharpton's NAN website a banner boasts "30,000 marched with NAN to Reclaim the Dream." That banner was linked to a Washington Post piece that doesn't back up that claim and instead displays a photo array of the rally.

Bill O'Reilly interviewed Al Sharpton and brought the reverend to task over his rhetoric claiming "they (Beck & his supporters) wanted to disgrace the day." Bill O'Reilly posed that a few thousand attended Sharpton's' rally while hundreds of thousands attended Beck's rally.

Sharpton mentioned that the numbers were usually 3,000 to 4,000 such as his last event in April drew. Bill O'Reilly was a guest speaker at the April event and was booed by the crowd. Sharpton claimed that the numbers at the Reclaim the Dream Rally were about ten times the amount at the April event, which corresponds to the 30,000 number mentioned on the NAN site.

Sharpton downplayed the numbers at Beck's 8/28 Rally pointing out that Beck planned it for over a year while he did his in a few months. Sharpton mentioned his involvement in the Million Man March to bolster his cred at drawing large numbers.

Don't blame his crowd size, it was cold that day.

On 8/28 in D.C. it was over 80 degrees; don't tell Al.

In keeping with the lunacy, Media Matters excoriated Glenn Beck for thanking God for an 82 degree forecast. Reverend Sharpton sure keeps strange bedfellows.

Can't we all just get along?

How many were at Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor Rally?

Wikipedia has an interesting write-up about the crowd size, listing various mainstream sources.

• An early AP report indicated "tens of thousands."

• CBS reported 87,000 based on crowd size estimates by AirPhotosLive.com

• NBC News estimated a much larger crowd of 500,000 people

• MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough repeatedly said "500,000"

• ABC News estimated "hundreds of thousands of people from around the country"

• The New York Post reported "an overflow crowd of 300,000 people"

Beck said, "I can tell you that it was in the hundreds of thousands; let's be on the low end, 300,000, and maybe as high as 650,000. For more pictures & videos visit glennbeck.com

Why no official count?

On October 16, 1995, the Nation of Islam (NOI) under the leadership of Louis Farrakhan conducted the Million Man March. The NOI claimed, as the name of the march implies, that over a million men, from African-American communities, attended the D.C. march.

The United States Park Police officially estimated the crowd size at 400,000. Farrakhan threatened to sue over the low estimate. The Park Service stopped making official counts after the Million Man March.

In 1997, Congress included language in a bill that prohibits the National Park Service from conducting crowd estimates in the District of Columbia.

Sometimes the message gets lost in the crowd. Becks's Restoring Honor Rally, regardless of how many people were there, was about self reflection, an acknowledgment of the nation's Judeo-Christian values and unifying the nation by embracing all citizens regardless of Party, race or religious belief.

Beck drove the point home and utilized many touching accounts that occurred at the 8/28 Rally to exemplify his clarion call of Faith, Hope and Charity.

Sources, embedded in article.