N.E. Brigand wrote: ↑Tue Jun 01, 2021 6:49 pm
Voronwë the Faithful wrote: ↑Tue Jun 01, 2021 5:03 pm
What a difference a year makes. Today, President Biden heads to Oklahoma to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, in which 100s of African-Americans were killed and flourishing Greenwood District (known as 'Black Wall Street') was destroyed,
with economic consequences that still resonate today.
I want to highlight that point about how the actions of a century ago can indeed result in continuing disparities today.
In the "Echo Chamber" thread, I noted one California's newspaper's experiment to see what happens when they reduced the amount of print given to national news. So by highlighting what is local news for me, this could be a crossover with that thread: the
Akron Beacon Journal reports that Monday, in the upscale Akron suburb of Hudson, the American Legion hosted a Memorial Day ceremony, and a featured speaker was a retired Army colonel named Barnard Kemter, a 1962 graduate of Hudson High School. Kemter devoted part of his eleven-minute speech to a history of the holiday, including a two-minute section about the role of African-Americans in Charleson in its creation.
The events' organizers, who had reviewed Kemter's speech in advance and asked him to excise that portion, cut the mike as he delivered these paragraphs:
More importantly than whether Charleston’s Decoration Day was the first, is the attention Charleston’s Black community paid to the nearly 260 Union troops who died at the site. For two weeks prior to the ceremony, former slaves and Black workmen exhumed the soldiers’ remains from a hastily dug mass grave behind the racetrack’s grandstand and gave each soldier a proper burial. They also constructed a fence to protect the site with an archway at the entrance that read "Martyrs of the Race Course."
The dead prisoners of war at the racetrack must have seemed especially worthy of honor to the former slaves. Just as the former slaves had, the dead prisoners had suffered imprisonment and mistreatment while held captive by white southerners.
Not surprisingly, many white southerners who had supported the Confederacy, including a large swath of white Charlestonians, did not feel compelled to spend a day decorating the graves of their former enemies. It was often the African American southerners who perpetuated the holiday in the years immediately following the Civil War.
African Americans across the South clearly helped shape the ceremony in its early years. Without African Americans, the ceremonies would have had far fewer in attendance in many areas, thus making the holiday less significant.
My generation grew up listening to the famous radio personality Paul Harvey. Paul would say at the end of his broadcast, "And now you know the rest of the story." And now you know the rest of the story about the origin of Memorial Day.
We are apparently still fighting the Civil War. As William Faulkner wrote:
The past is never dead. It's not even past.