Posted in Memory of Reconstruction

Washington Post: What A True Memorial Day Celebration Would Look Like

   Published Date: June 1, 2021  Leave a Comment on Washington Post: What A True Memorial Day Celebration Would Look Like

The Washington Post has an editorial this weekend on how Memorial Day should be celebrated. Here are some excerpts:

WHILE IT’S unlikely anyone can say with certainty what were the origins of America’s Memorial Day, it is generally accepted that the custom of decorating graves in remembrance of the war dead began after the Civil War, among families of fallen Confederate soldiers. But the historian David W. Blight makes an argument that the first such observance was in fact the work of newly freed Black people seeking to honor the 40,000 African American soldiers who died in the war. The tribute consisted of elaborate ceremonies, parades, prayers, scripture readings and speeches. The Black soldiers deserved the honor: They gave their lives for the most American of causes, freedom and Union. It’s good, though, that they had such attention lavished on them then, because fairly soon afterward, they faded from much of the nation’s memory, as did their cause.

Instead, over time in the late 19th century, many such observances of this day of remembrance became occasions for unreconstructed Confederates to advance what became known as the Lost Cause, a willful displacement of actual history by a mythology meant to justify the rebellion and all but deify its leaders. They portrayed Southern soldiers as chivalrous and brave but unable to overcome Yankee numbers and industrial might. They spoke of a Southern “nation” united against Northern “aggression,” and of the happiness and contentment of their enslaved “servants.” The military genius of Robert E. Lee and the virtue and necessity of white supremacy were extolled.

Missing from most versions of this tale was any semblance of reality, including such things as the opposition to secession shared by many thousands of southern Whites who benefited little or not at all from the slave economy. The horrors of slavery were all but ignored. The great tragedy was that so much of this myth made its way into the public consciousness, North and South, contributing to a century of repression and racial discrimination that mocked Abraham Lincoln’s hope — voiced among the soldiers’ graves at Gettysburg — that their deaths would not be in vain but would bring a new birth of freedom.

On a Memorial Day 58 years after that speech, White mobs in Tulsa engaged in one of the worst riots in American history, in which an unknown number of Black people were killed and the city’s thriving Black business district destroyed. Among those trying to stop the mob was a sizable contingent of African American World War I veterans. On the other side were numerous White veterans.

That same year, 1921, the nation’s attention turned to a ceremony on a hillside overlooking the nation’s capital: the interment of an unknown soldier of the Great War, one of many thousands whose remains could not be identified. The dignified passage of the soldier’s casket from France to Arlington National Cemetery was closely followed by millions of Americans, and many thousands came to view the interment on Nov. 11, 1921.

“Today, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is as solid in the public psyche as its massive marble slabs are heavy on the hallowed ground,” Steve Hendrix wrote in The Post a few years ago. “The resting place of one ‘soldier known but to God’ sits at the center of national remembrance.”

Part of that remembrance should include words spoken in Congress by Hamilton Fish Jr., a Republican representative from New York who had commanded a Black unit in the Great War. The purpose, he said, was “to bring home the body of an unknown American warrior who in himself represents no section, creed, or race in the late war and who typifies, moreover, the soul of America and the supreme sacrifice of her heroic dead.”

A century later, that is still the standard for a true Memorial Day.

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Author: Patrick Young

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