New York Times Finds A Way To Link Memorial Day And Racism
"the holiday’s Black history has not been universally embraced..."
The Civil War resulted in the single most significant loss of American life in any armed conflict in US history. No, Duh, you say Americans were killing Americans over the future of America, a conflict arrived at for numerous reasons we won’t get into here. But when it ended, the slaves were freed. The cost of blood and treasure was enormous.
Memorial Day began as a remembrance of that loss.
Decoration Day
History.com notes that “one of the earliest Memorial Day commemorations was organized by a group of formerly enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina, less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865.” Former slaves gathered to honor the war dead regardless of race. In Memorium for “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.”
Those are the words of General John A. Logan, who organized Civil War veterans in support of an official day to remember the dead. May 30th became Decoration Day in the North.
On the first Decoration Day, General James Garfield made a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, and 5,000 participants decorated the graves of the 20,000 Civil War soldiers buried there.
The South continued to honor their war dead with each state choosing a different day until decades later.
[I]n 1966 the federal government declared Waterloo, New York, the official birthplace of Memorial Day.
Waterloo—which first celebrated the day on May 5, 1866—was chosen because it hosted an annual, community-wide event, during which businesses closed and residents decorated the graves of soldiers with flowers and flags.
In 1968, Congress made Memorial Day the last Monday in May, and beginning in May of 1971, it officially became a national holiday.
Making It About Racism
On May 25th (of this year), Livia Albeck-Ripka is credited with a New York Times piece typical of 21st-century media in the run-up to a holiday the progressives are forced to tolerate. (After the 4th of July, Memorial Day is regarded as the second most patriotic holiday on the US Calendar.)
Albeck-Ripka covers the bases.
The holiday grew out of the Civil War, as Americans — Northern, Southern, Black and white — struggled to honor the staggering numbers of dead soldiers, at least 2 percent of the U.S. population at the time. Several places lay claim to being the birthplace of Memorial Day. One of the earliest accounts comes from Boalsburg, Pa., where, in October 1864, three women are said to have placed flowers and wreaths on the graves of men who had died serving the Union during the Civil War.
But being the New York Times, it can’t possibly leave well enough alone. Before the article is over, unity must be undermined with division.
Nearly 160 years after the end of the American Civil War, the true origins of Memorial Day remain unclear, experts say. But the holiday’s Black history has not been universally embraced. In 2021, the microphone of a veteran who had tried to credit Black Americans was silenced during an American Legion service in Hudson, Ohio.
“Charleston forgot this story because it did not fit” the emerging narrative in the defeated South, David W. Blight, a historian at Yale University, said. In the 1990s he uncovered the details of the racecourse procession, which took place at a site that had once been popular among plantation owners. Of the Black marchers, he added, “They were reinscribing it, as a place to commemorate their freedom.”
Freedom was gained thanks to the lives of soldiers, black and white, and people who were thankful for that decorated the graves of the fallen without regard to race politics that the political left continues to stoke.
There is also no mention by Albeck-Ripka that Democrats were the party of slavery nor its nearly century-long post-Civil War commitment, well into the 1960s, to keep black Americans separate and repressed subjects unworthy of their white privilege.
It is a nod that excludes the complicity of the New York Times’ racist ideological ancestors.
It didn’t have to be that way.
The first thirteen paragraphs would have sufficed. It was a decent recycling of an annual obligation to explore the history, but the partisan progressive impulse to invest in racial tension was probably a prerequisite for publication. I suppose the question then is, was it Albeck-Ripka who couldn’t resist or that of her editors?
Memorial Day
Memorial Day is a holiday to remember all of America’s war dead without regard to demographics. Citizens who volunteered or were chosen since the Civil War to do Uncle Sam’s bidding gave everything in the end, regardless of how history imagined or reimagined the theater or its objectives.
It should be, like any national holiday, like life in our Nation, colorblind. It is a moment to remember that we are imperfect but blessed to have been born here, to be here. A land of opportunity, despite a ceaseless effort to undermine it with the vision of a government to whom we would all be slaves, run by the party of slavery, of whom the New York Times is but another convenient mouthpiece.