What Does Memorial Day Mean To You?
Being an army brat and a retired military spouse, I am diverging from my usual article geared towards composers to focus on Memorial Day. The excerpts below are taken from an email that I received from my friend, Jeanne, who is a professional, caucasian-American who grew up in America. This article isn’t left or right. It just “is.” Please read it for what it is.
Re: Memorial Day Weekend – A Time of Remembrance to Build a More Just Future
Dear God-Image Bearers 🙂
Growing up in the 60s and 70s, the Memorial Day holiday meant for me the smell of grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, the start of summer, and some memories of parades, and old men wearing caps and medals, holding small American flags.
From my grandfather’s traumatic time in WWI, to others serving in WWII, the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts/wars, I believed every generation of American men would be drafted and go to war. I was puzzled by it, but like this whole history we are discovering, I had no idea of the insidious stronghold of thinking, “it is what it is”.
But as we get older, we hopefully get wiser in crafting our future, still ready to learn from our past as well as from the young. This year, I have learned once again another American value and custom inspired by the resiliency, patriotism, and humanity of our people of African descent. Memorial Day. It was also a time when our better angels in Christianity showed up, too.
“When Charleston fell and Confederate troops evacuated the badly damaged city, those freed from enslavement remained. One of the first things those emancipated men and women did was to give the fallen Union prisoners a proper burial. They exhumed the mass grave and reinterred the bodies in a new cemetery with a tall whitewashed fence inscribed with the words: “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
And then on May 1, 1865, something even more extraordinary happened. According to two reports that Blight found in The New York Tribune and The Charleston Courier, a crowd of 10,000 people, mostly freed slaves with some white missionaries, staged a parade around the race track. Three thousand Black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and sang “John Brown’s Body.” Members of the famed 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments were in attendance and performed double-time marches. Black ministers recited verses from the Bible.”
Three years later, Decoration Day was started.
“On May 5, 1868, General John A. Logan, leader of an organization for Northern Civil War veterans, called for a nationwide day of remembrance later that month. “The 30th of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land,” he proclaimed.”
Fifty-six years later, a night of terror occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I first shared with you news of its history, a commission to honor it, and news of the Congressional Hearings.
Instead, this weekend we can honor those who fell protecting our country, and those survivors, the descendants of survivors, and our African American brothers and sisters, by a moment of silence or watching a documentary on Tulsa.
History Channel: Sunday, May 30, 8:00 PM ET: Executive produced by NBA superstar and philanthropist Russell Westbrook, and directed by Peabody and Emmy-Award® winning director Stanley Nelson (“Freedom Riders”) and Peabody and duPont-Award winner Marco Williams (“Two Towns of Jasper”), the documentary commemorates the 100th anniversary of the horrific Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history, and calls attention to the previously ignored but necessary repair of a town once devastated.
CNN: May 31st, 9:00 PM ET: Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street” is a new documentary that explores the history of Black Wall Street and the violent events of late May and June 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that resulted in the slaughter of hundreds of the city’s African American residents.
Tuesday June 1st. 7:30-8:45 ET: (Courtesy of one in our own racial reconciliation community)
The Color of Wealth: The Destruction of Greenwood and Tulsa’s Legacy of Loss The widening racial wealth gap in the United States is a troubling sign that millions of families are not equipped to offer better opportunities for future generations. Wealth allows families to make investments in homes, in education, in their own health, in businesses, and in other assets that create financial security for families and prosperity for entire communities. https://event.newschool.edu/onlinethecolorofwealththedestr
Similarly, another friend shared the below opinion piece in Friday’s Washington Post which eloquently illustrated why we should all know our history. If so inspired, please share with others.
If you were not familiar with the Tulsa Race Massacre until recent times, you are not alone. The history was not widely known across greater America, and you will see different references to the casualty number. It seems the overriding conclusion to the exact number is “nobody knows”. In 2001, a commission concluded its study and its report is linked below.
Its prologue’s opening is powerful:
“A mob destroyed 35-square-blocks of the African American Community during the evening of May 31, through the afternoon of June 1, 1921. It was a tragic, infamous moment in Oklahoma and the nation’s history. The worse civil disturbance since the Civil War. In the aftermath of the death and destruction the people of our state suffered from a fatigue of faith — some still search for a statute of limitation on morality, attempting to forget the longevity of the residue of in justice that at best can leave little room for the healing of the heart. Perhaps this report, and subsequent humanitarian recovery events by the governments and the good people of the state will extract us from the guilt and confirm the commandment of a good and just God — leaving the deadly deeds of 1921 buried in the call for redemption, historical correctness, and repair. Then we can proudly sing together:
“We know we belong to this land. “And the land we belong to is grand, and when we say, ay yippy yi ki yea, “We’re only saying, you’re doing fine Oklahoma.” “Oklahoma, you’re O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A, Oklahoma OK.”
Hopefully with this report, the feeling of the state will be quickened, the conscience of the brutal city will be ignited, the hypocrisy of the nation will be exposed, and the crimes against God and man denounced. Oklahoma can set such an example. It was Abolitionist Frederick Douglass who reminded a callous nation that “[A] government that can give liberty in its Con- stitution ought to have the power to protect liberty, and impose civilized behavior in its administration.”
Notes:
https://www.history.com/news/memorial-day-civil-war-slavery-charleston
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.history.com/.amp/topics/holidays/memorial-day-history
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/27/american-history-we-should-all-be-woke/
https://www.okhistory.org/research/forms/freport.pdf
To our fallen who have protected our country and/or fell building it up.
Shalom-
Jeanne
