Remembering to Remember on Memorial Day

For most of us today, there will be parades and flag-waving and lots of barbecues.

But it is important that we take a few minutes to remember the origins of a day meant to honor America’s war dead.

As David W. Blight writes in today’s New York Times, the holiday that we now know as Memorial Day began with a spontaneous commemoration of the end of the Civil War and a celebration by black workmen in Charleston, S.C., who went to the city racetrack where Union dead had been stored and “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,’” Blight writes.

A parade of 10,000 followed, leading into a dedication ceremony and, as if to presage the dominant activity of future Memorial Days, picnics.

The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.

The Charleston memorial faded out of memory –suppressed is more accurate – as the South recast the war as one of Northern aggression that disrupted an idyllic life (think “Gone With the Wind” with its happy slaves and menacing Northern troops).

This brings me to my point: Memorial Day has become not only a day for sales and barbecues, but one for flag-waving and jingoistic displays.

Forgotten in the hoopla, however, is this original celebration – and any sense of the solemnity that should be part of a day designed to honor the 1.53 million Americans who have died in the nation’s wars, nearly 5,000 of them in the ongoing war on terror.

The sacrifices made by these soldiers – and the millions of others who were injured in battle – cannot be questioned. The motivations of the men who sent them into battle can. The wars we fight often are the result of a failure on the part of our leaders to find peaceful solutions to conflict. Our young men and women pay the price for this failure.

We should keep this in mind today as we celebrate with family. We should take a moment to reflect on this.