In 2002, the roadway east of Mill Avenue was re-designed as a 1.5-acre public park. The wide concrete walkway around the south and west sides of City Hall includes various types of landscaping and several park benches.

In a second phase of development, Ragsdale-MLK Park was expanded 1.5 acres to the east in 2009 as part of the construction of a 400-space parking structure next to City Hall. Tempe transformed the left-behind street level parking lot into the second part of Ragsdale-MLK Park, a green oasis in the middle of busy downtown. The expansion brings more grass, plazas, trees and art to Mill Avenue. It also features a curvilinear great walk with patterned brickwork, a shade trellis which doubles as a band shell and an artistic sundial. 

Veteran Tuskegee Airman Lincoln J. Ragsdale was one of Arizona’s greatest champions of civil rights.  Along with his wife, Eleanor, Lincoln Ragsdale was involved in organizations including the Greater Phoenix Council for Civic Unity, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Phoenix Urban League.  The Ragsdales were key supporters of the effort that led to the successful lawsuit against the segregated Phoenix Union High School in 1952, a landmark case cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education the following year. The Ragsdales successfully challenged the historic “red line” between White and Black neighborhoods when they purchased a home in the exclusive Encanto district of Phoenix.  An ASU alum, Lincoln Ragsdale invited Martin Luther King, Jr. to speak at Arizona State University in June 1964, an event attended by 8,000 people.  An educator who came to Arizona to teach at the Dunbar Elementary School in the late 1940s, Eleanor Ragsdale worked with her husband’s Alma Mater to build financial aid programs to assist Black and Mexican American students beginning school at ASU.  Although Lincoln Ragsdale lived in Phoenix, the enormously important work that he and his wife did for civil rights in Arizona reverberated through Tempe and throughout the state.  Mindful of the rights of service members as a veteran himself, Ragsdale fought for Pfc. Thomas Reed (who died in service in Korea) to be buried at Greenwood Memory Lawn Cemetery in Phoenix, breaking the practice of segregation of the veterans’ section of that cemetery.

Public Art at Ragsdale-MLK Park includes:

Greetings from Tempe by Susan Gamble

Plaza Reflector Lights by Steve Martino

Solar Time by R. Newton Mayall

Above the Crowd by John Randall Nelson

Earth Quilt by Meiny Vermaas-van der Heide