On remembering the origins of Memorial Day

I didn't have time to sit down and write this weekend, but I felt compelled to write something short about Memorial Day, especially given the ubiquity of statements about supporting our troops who "fight for our freedom" and the sheer abundance of disremembering I hear and see all around, both in conversation walking around in physical spaces and in posts/comments/images in the virtual spaces of social media, on a day that is about nothing if not memory itself.

Because I know I'm so predictable by this point, I know those of you who have read my previous posts here at Liberal D.O.G.MA know what's coming: something about race, right? 

Right.

But I promised a short piece.

Ok, so first point: Memorial Day began as something called Decoration Day, which itself was begun following the American Civil War. More to the point, the first Decoration Day was May 1, 1865. To quote from a New York Times op-ed by historian David Blight (go read his book Race and Reunion now): 

"The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.

After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible."

Now, second point: why does it matter that we remember these African American origins of Memorial Day and their relation to the Civil War? 

Again, I promised a short piece. So here we go. 

On one level, it is simply (?) important in itself that we acknowledge the prominent role African Americans played in beginning one of our most definitively American traditions, thus reminding us again that African American identity is central, not merely marginal, to American identity.

On another level, it is important to correct mistakes in the historical record of collective memory. Simply put, most folks don't know at all that the first celebrations of what would later be called Memorial Day were enacted by African Americans following the Civil War. And this has ideological consequences in how we think about Memorial Day.

The first celebrators of Memorial Day were indeed celebrating the memory of soldiers who "fought for our freedom," but there was nothing abstract or politically neutral about this statement, and it was very clear who was included in that "our." Indeed, very literally these early Decoration Day celebrators were acknowledging that soldiers died in a war which ultimately resulted in the eradication of institutionalized chattel slavery. It is impossible to re-remember this origin story of Memorial Day without also re-remembering the story about the reasons for the American Civil War and acknowledging that not all motivations for going to war are created equal. 

When we re-remember this origin story, then, we have to rethink this day about memory. For whose freedom do American soldiers fight? Are all wars "just wars"? Do all wars deserve the same kind of respect? Is it possible to honor the warriors while vehemently condemning the violence and imperialism of the war? (I think so) What kinds of more complex and nuanced understandings of war are necessarily called forth when we remember that Memorial Day began as a celebration of one American cause for fighting -- abolition -- over another -- the continuation of slavery?  

How must we think better about how we think about war, given that the very origins of Memorial Day equally point to both the American motivation to fight for freedom and the American motivation to fight for economic motive at the expense of a blatant disrespect for basic humanity?