"Black people may have started Memorial Day. Whites erased it from history."

[deurbano]

(Same as it ever was...)

I subscribe to the Washington Post, and I'm trying to provide this link as one of my ten "gifts" for the month, so hope it works!

https://wapo.st/3ONHUBl

"Black people may have started Memorial Day. Whites erased it from history."
By Donald Beaulieu. May 29, 2023

On May 1, 1865, thousands of newly freed Black people gathered in Charleston, S.C., for what may have been the nation’s first Memorial Day celebration. Attendees held a parade and put flowers on the graves of Union soldiers who had helped liberate them from slavery.

The event took place three weeks after the Civil War surrender of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and two weeks after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. It was a remarkable moment in U.S. history — at the nexus of war and peace, destruction and reconstruction, servitude and emancipation....

...The portrayal of the Civil War and its aftermath was controlled in the South by groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Ladies’ Memorial Association, as well as Confederate veterans, Blight said. “The Daughters of the Confederacy were the guardians of that narrative,” said Damon Fordham, an adjunct professor of history at The Citadel, a military college in Charleston. “And much of that was skewed toward the Confederate point of view.”...

...In the 1880s, the bodies of the Union soldiers, the “Martyrs of the Race Course,” were exhumed and moved to Beaufort National Cemetery. The horse track closed shortly after that, and the 60 acres of land became Hampton Park, named for Wade Hampton III, a Confederate general and Charleston native who became governor of South Carolina in 1876. Hampton enslaved nearly 1,000 people before the war, and his governorship was supported by the Red Shirts, a White paramilitary group that violently suppressed the Black vote.

[MagickMuffin]

1. And today's gop are whitewashing once again

The south shall rise again.


And will be defeated again and again and again!

[deurbano]

3. My mother was a member of the United Daughter's of the Confederacy, and

she used to say "The South shall rise again," after meetings in Bakersfield, CA in the 1960s. (Bakersfield was kind of like Mississippi West.) My family had moved there from the Mississippi Delta, where my father had been a member of the White Citizens' Council. Both parents became Republicans after they decided JFK and the Dems were too supportive of civil rights.

My 92-year-old mother went to My Kev's birthday in DC in January because she's known him his whole life... and she's also still a rightwing fanatic. (Like all Republicans, now.)

And yes, we just have to keep on defeating them, like "whack-a-mole"! (They are relentless.)

[NotVeryImportant]

10. What did she mean, exactly, by the statement

"The South shall rise again?"

Did you ever get that answer?

[deurbano]

11. She said it jokingly.... but I didn't know back then what the UDC was up to.

Like, I didn't know the pivotal role they played in whitewashing the history of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction.

But I think she meant that the South and Southern values (especially racism) would ultimately prevail. I have to say I was pretty confident the ideas she and my dad subscribed to were on their way out (with the trash), and would largely die out with their age cohort. I was (naively) shocked to find so many fellow Americans sharing those archaic, hateful perspectives. (Of course, I am no longer shocked... )

[Rhiannon12866]

13. When we covered the Civil Rights movement in 9th grade history class, I thought the same thing.

And my grandmother said she was eligible to belong to the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution), but she told me once that this wasn't the kind of organization that she wanted to belong to.

[deurbano]

14. Your grandmother was (is?) way cooler than my mom!

[Rhiannon12866]

15. And yet she continued to vote for "the party of Lincoln" until she joined a peace group in the late

'80s - and switched parties to vote for Bill Clinton in '92 and '96. And since she was born in 1900, those years were also her age.

[judesedit]

5. I wish they'd put the tax rate on the wealthy back to 90% or whatever it was back then

[ismnotwasm]

2. K&R

[PXR-5]

4. Ah, that explains things for me.

We moved to NC from NJ 26 years ago in late May.

There was no talk of "memorial day" we both just started new jobs and and had to work.

I mentioned this to a few locals and I was told we have Veterans Day, what the heck is this memorial day thing?

[electric_blue68]

6. Woah. More hidden history.

[Lonestarblue]

7. Excellent article and another example of hidden history.

I don’t believe that every event in history can be taught because there would not be time, but I do believe that too much of our history taught in schools focuses on white accomplishments with too little mention of minorities. And now Republicans are trying to erase the little bit of non-white history that is taught.

I also think that history textbooks focus too much on events and not enough on the context surrounding them—the people, their motivations, beliefs, traditions, social conditions, etc. at the time. We don’t seem to do much with cause-effect analyses that require students (and adults) to identify the consequences of actions and decide whether they are positive or negative so the negative ones will hopefully not be repeated. That’s how you learn from history. Republicans seem to have missed those lessons.

[Duppers]

8. I agree.

[UTUSN]

9. Not to forget uneducateds not knowing it's meaning

[Rhiannon12866]

12. K&R! Excellent reminder, thanks so much for sharing this!