Memorial Day as an African-American Holiday

I have shared versions of this service with two UU congregations and expect to share it with a third in May 2012. I would like to make a practice of sharing it with other congregations in future years. If you would like to consider my speaking to your congregation on some Memorial Day weekend, please contact me.

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If you wish to use or distribute this text in any way, for any purpose, please contact me first.

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Music:

The music and readings that I include in this service come from African-American history and are intended to help a congregation feel the arc of nineteenth-century African-American experience. Unless otherwise noted, they can be found in Singing the Living Tradition.

Opening Hymn: #156: “Oh, Freedom”

Opening Reading: #579: “The Limits of Tyrants,” by Frederick Douglass

Song before sermon: “Marching Song of the First Arkansas Regiment”

Closing Hymn: #149: “Lift Every Voice and Sing”

Song Introduction & Song Lyrics:

I would like to ask you to join me in singing a song that was sung by African Americans during the Civil War. This song was written for the First Arkansas Regiment, which was one of the first African American units in the Union army. At the time, it was very controversial whether to allow black men to fight. Could they be trusted with guns? Were they smart enough to learn military techniques? Would they turn their weapons against whites?

Not everyone approved when Abraham Lincoln decided to start enlisting black men, but most black people were delighted. They saw the Union cause as their cause, and they were very proud of their soldiers fighting for freedom. They also, quite rightly, saw the enlistment of black troops as a symbol of white society finally accepting their humanity and their citizenship.

Having black officers, however, would have been impossible at the time, so all of the officers in the black units were white. Captain Lindley Miller specifically asked to lead a black regiment, and he wrote this song for his troops to sing, which they apparently did with enthusiasm.

I hope you too will sing with enthusiasm the Marching Song of the First Arkansas Regiment. The words are in your order of service, and the tune will definitely be familiar to you.

“Marching Song of the First Arkansas Regiment”

By Captain Lindley Miller of the First Arkansas Volunteer Infantry Regiment (African Descent)
First line by Sojourner Truth
To the tune of “Battle Hymn of the Republic”

We are the valiant soldiers who’ve enlisted for the war.
We are fighting for the Union, we are fighting for the law,
We can hit a Rebel further than a white man ever saw,
As we go marching on.

Chorus:
Glory, glory hallelujah.
Glory, glory hallelujah.
Glory, glory hallelujah.
As we go marching on.

See, there above the center, where the flag is waving bright,
We are going out of slavery; we’re bound for freedom’s light;
We mean to show Jeff Davis how the Africans can fight,
As we go marching on! (Chorus)

We have done with hoeing cotton, we have done with hoeing corn,
We are colored Yankee soldiers, now, as sure as you are born;
When the masters hear us yelling, they’ll think it’s Gabriel’s horn,
As we go marching on. (Chorus)

They will have to pay us wages, the wages of their sin,
They will have to bow their foreheads to their colored kith and kin,
They will have to give us house-room, or the roof shall tumble in!
As we go marching on. (Chorus)

We heard the Proclamation, master hush it as he will,
The bird he sing it to us, hoppin’ on the cotton hill,
And the possum up the gum tree, he couldn’t keep it still,
As he went climbing on. (Chorus)

They said, “Now colored brethren, you shall be forever free,
From the first of January, Eighteen hundred sixty-three.”
We heard it in the river going rushing to the sea,
As it went sounding on. (Chorus)

Father Abraham has spoken and the message has been sent,
The prison doors he opened, and out the pris’ners went,
To join the sable army of “African descent,”
As we go marching on. (Chorus)

Then fall in, colored brethren, you’d better do it soon,
Don’t you hear the drum a-beating the Yankee Doodle tune?
We are with you now this morning, we’ll be far away at noon,
As we go marching on. (Chorus)

Reading:

I would like to start by sharing with you a description of the first Memorial Day. This celebration took place in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1865, just sixteen days after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. During the war the Confederates had converted the local horse-racing track into an open-air prison for Union soldiers, and at least 257 men had died from exposure and disease, and were buried in shallow unmarked graves. As soon as General Lee surrendered, local blacks and a few whites began to organize a memorial for these un-named Union dead. The historian David Blight later described this huge event:

“The ‘First Decoration Day’ … involved an estimated ten thousand people, most of them black former slaves. During April, twenty-eight black men from one of the local churches built a suitable enclosure for the burial ground at the Race Course. … [T]hey constructed a fence ten feet high … and landscaped the graves into neat rows. The wooden fence was whitewashed and an archway was built over the gate … On the arch, painted in black letters, the workmen inscribed, ‘Martyrs of the Race Course.’

At nine o’clock in the morning on May 1, the procession to this special cemetery began as three thousand black schoolchildren (newly enrolled in freedmen’s schools) marched around the Race Course, each with an armload of roses and singing ‘John Brown’s Body.’ The children were followed by three hundred black women representing the Patriotic Association, a group organized to distribute clothing and other goods among the freedpeople. The women carried baskets of flowers, wreaths, and crosses to the burial ground. The Mutual Aid Society, a benevolent association of black men, next marched in cadence around the track and into the cemetery, followed by large crowds of white and black citizens. All dropped their spring blossoms on the graves in a scene recorded by a newspaper correspondent …

‘the holy mounds – the tops, the sides, and the spaces between them – were one mass of flowers, not a speck of earth could be seen; and as the breeze wafted the sweet perfume from them … there were few eyes among those who knew the meaning of the ceremony that were not dim with tears of joy’ …

The official dedication ceremony was conducted by the ministers of all the black churches in Charleston. With prayers, the reading of biblical passages, and the singing of spirituals, black Charlestonians gave birth to an American tradition. …

The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. But the struggle to own the meaning of Memorial Day in particular, and of Civil War memory in general, had only begun.”

(From David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory)

Sermon:

For many years, I basically tried to ignore Memorial Day. The holiday made me uncomfortable.

I wasn’t really clear what it was about, but I had a vague idea that it was for honoring American soldiers who had died in wars, while Veterans’ Day was for honoring American soldiers who had survived wars. Like many UUs I am uncomfortable with American militarism, and I certainly don’t believe that all of our wars have been good and honorable. So I felt uncomfortable with a holiday that seemed to celebrate warfare.

For many people, however, it seems that Memorial Day is mostly a celebration of summer. It is a day for cookouts and parties, for breaking out the grill and wearing the white clothing. That’s all fine. I certainly have no objections to grills and parties. But the part of me that does want to honor the suffering and the sacrifice of Americans who died for our country and its ideals can feel uncomfortable with the Memorial Day that is all about summer, with no sense of reverence.

So, stuck between war and grilled meat, it has seemed easiest, as the years have gone by, to just ignore this holiday.

I was quite surprised, therefore, when I learned that Memorial Day was started by African Americans as a way to honor the Union soldiers who had died for their freedom.

“the holy mounds – the tops, the sides, and the spaces between them – were one mass of flowers, not a speck of earth could be seen; and as the breeze wafted the sweet perfume from them … there were few eyes among those who knew the meaning of the ceremony that were not dim with tears of joy”

This Memorial Day was a celebration of liberation and freedom, of the triumph of justice over injustice. It honored the tremendous sacrifices that had been necessary to accomplish that liberation. Not just the 257 soldiers buried in that cemetery, but all the soldiers who had fought and suffered, killed and died, to preserve the United States as one country and to advance its ideals of liberty and justice for all.

I have a doctorate in American history, and I did not know this bit of history until a few years ago.

As I kept reading, I realized that my ignorance was not a personal failing. In the ten years after the end of the Civil War, this country saw a huge struggle over how the war would be remembered. Memory carries meaning. History is the story of a people. As people told and re told the story of the war, they shaped its meaning and determined what its legacy would be.
For African-Americans, the story and the desired legacy were clear. The war was a war for their liberation. Its legacy was their freedom.

Some white people agreed. They saw slavery as a form of injustice, and they saw its eradication as an opportunity to improve the lives not just of the black freed people, but also of poor and disenfranchised whites. For example, the southern states had no public school systems before the war, but afterwards the Republican party required the new state constitutions to guarantee public education for all children as a prerequisite for returning to Congress.

Throughout the South, black and white Republicans started schools, created more equitable tax systems, and started to try to use the mechanisms of government to improve the lives of ordinary people. They saw the Civil War as the foundation of a new American Republic, one that would be built, in the words of Thaddeus Stevens, “upon the firm foundation of eternal justice.”

Many white Southerners, however, told different stories about the war. It was the War of Northern Aggression. It was an unfair assault on their society. Its legacy might well be the destruction of white culture, as savage and ignorant former slaves were allowed to do whatever they pleased.

Many white Northerners shared this fear of the former slaves. Even more, they feared that the civil war might not actually be over, that the country might be permanently broken, that the Union of trust could not be restored. They sought reconciliation with the Southern states, so that the legacy of the war would be a country reunited.

Several Southern states soon passed laws, known as Black Codes, that required all black people to be able to show proof of employment at all times. If a black man or a black woman did not have a job, they could be arrested as a vagrant and sentenced to months or years of forced labor. This was hardly freedom.

Vigilante violence also escalated during the post-war years. Lynchings became common, as they had never been under slavery. Lynching is a short word to describe the long torture of a human being that inflicts as much pain as possible before death.

The KKK and other vigilante groups also whipped untold numbers not just of black men, but also black women and black children. These whippings sometimes left their victims near the edge of death and permanently maimed.

Many black schools were torched. Many teachers in black schools, both black and white, were murdered. Any black person who succeeded in a business venture risked attracting attention from a mob intent on arson, torture, or murder.

Most Americans now understand that slavery was horrific. But I think many Americans do not understand just how horrific the eighty years after the end of slavery could be. We talk of Jim Crow, and segregated water fountains, and segregated schools, and the challenges and humiliations of trying to find a place to live, get a job, travel, or even just buy an ice cream cone.

Those things were real, and their effects are still real. Even now the average black family has a lot less wealth than the average white family, largely because for so many generations blacks rarely had access to good educations, good jobs, and home ownership.

But it wasn’t just segregation. Those rules were backed up by a threat of violence that could erupt at any time, for any reason or none. This constant threat of violence instilled in many African Americans a sense of wariness and distrust that was passed from parent to child. This sense of fear, of needing to be careful, of the world not being a safe and welcoming place, went too deep to be eradicated in a generation.

So this was the context of the early Memorial Day celebrations. Some, like the one in Charleston, were organized primarily by blacks and emphasized liberation and thankfulness. Others were organized by whites and blacks together and emphasized the creation of a new society.

The Unitarian minister Fielder Israel spoke at one such Memorial Day gathering in Wilmington, Delaware. The whole day was a celebration of unity within diversity, with all of the city’s different churches and ethnic groups participating. Blacks walked beside whites, Catholics beside Protestants. And Reverend Israel told the crowd that responsibility for the war lay solidly with Southerners, with “the murderers of those whose memories we were here to honor.”

Many white Northerners, however, feared that such rhetoric would prevent national reconciliation and healing. Too much focus on the causes of the war, or the injustice of slavery, or the rights of black people, they felt, would fan the flames of sectional antagonism. It was better to let the past be the past, and to not look too closely at what was happening in the present.

Both Northerners and Southerners, therefore, flocked to Memorial Day celebrations that urged peace, forgiveness, and honoring the heroism of all soldiers. Horace Greeley, a Northerner who ran for president in 1872, sounded the new call: “I entreat you to forget the years of slavery, and secession, and civil war now happily past … forget that some of you have been masters, others slaves, — some for disunion, others against it, — and remember only that you are … all now and henceforth freemen.”

These Memorial Day orators celebrated the valor and nobility of all the soldiers, the sacrifices all endured, and the strength of character all revealed by their devotion to a cause. One of the most popular poems of the period spoke of this gentle and forgiving memory:

By the flow of the inland river,
Whence the fleets of iron have fled,
Where the blades of the grave-grass quiver,
Asleep are the ranks of the dead:
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day;
Under the one, the Blue,
Under the other, the Gray

These in the robings of glory,
Those in the gloom of defeat,
All with the battle-blood gory,
In the dusk of eternity meet:
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day
Under the laurel, the Blue,
Under the willow, the Gray.

From the silence of sorrowful hours
The desolate mourners go,
Lovingly laden with flowers
Alike for the friend and the foe;
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day;
Under the roses, the Blue,
Under the lilies, the Gray.

So with an equal splendor,
The morning sun-rays fall,
With a touch impartially tender,
On the blossoms blooming for all:
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day;
Broidered with gold, the Blue,
Mellowed with gold, the Gray.

No more shall the war cry sever,
Or the winding rivers be red;
They banish our anger forever
When they laurel the graves of our dead!
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day,
Love and tears for the Blue,
Tears and love for the Gray.

African-Americans continued to insist that there was a difference between the Blue and the Gray, that the two causes were not equal, and that it matters what soldiers fight for.

Frederick Douglass was, as always, eloquent: “We are sometimes asked in the name of patriotism,” he said, “to … remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life, and those who struck to save it – those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice … I would not repel the repentant, but … may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth before I forget the difference between the parties to that … bloody conflict … [I]f this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all things sacred what shall men remember?”

Douglass understood why white Americans wanted peace. Like every person of his time he knew all too well the horrors of war. But he refused to accept a peace between whites that was literally built on the backs of black people. He saw what was happening to his people, and like the biblical prophet Jeremiah he denounced “this cry of peace! peace! where there is no peace.”
But within a decade of the end of the Civil War it was common for Union and Confederate veterans to conduct Memorial Day exercises together, as a ritual of national reconciliation.

Some towns even tried to exclude blacks from Memorial Day celebrations, making Memorial Day, like so much of the public sphere, a whites-only event.

And so the forgetting began. This was not an accidental forgetting, due only to the passage of time. It was an active suppression of a holiday that had been started to celebrate liberation as well as sacrifice, freedom as well as suffering. And it was accompanied by a steady erosion of black people’s political and economic freedom and physical safety.

And so this is why I did not know the history of Memorial Day. In the years after the war there was a contest over how it would be remembered. African-Americans lost. And they thus lost the public space in which to tell their own stories.

Don’t get me wrong – the country did need healing, desperately. People needed to feel like we were one country again.

But in this particular way of healing lay the seeds of the idea that war has its good side because it gives its participants an opportunity to practice courage, bravery, patriotism, heroism, service, sacrifice, and other such virtues.

A generation later, around the time of the Spanish-American War, William James pointed out that if you could ask his contemporaries whether they would, if such things were possible, vote now to have the Civil War not exist, and a peaceful history replace its battles, “hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out.”

This sort of idealization of war is what I flinched away from in all those years that I did not celebrate Memorial Day. For I suspect that the idea that war has its good side makes us more willing to go to war. I am not someone who says that war is never the right answer. I sadly agree with Frederick Douglass that sometimes tyrants must be forced to have limits. But I believe that war should be one of our last answers. I do not deny the sacrifice experienced by anyone who has fought, killed, or died in a war, but I believe that some of those sacrifices were far more worth while than others.

Some of you may be familiar with Reverend Mark Morrison-Reed. He is an African-American who grew up Unitarian Universalist and is now a UU minister. In his recent memoir, titled In Between, he reflects on the damage done to African-Americans and to all Americans by the lack of a holiday that marks and celebrates African-Americans’ liberation from slavery. He contrasts the sense of shame still carried by so many African-Americans with the pride with which Jews tell their own story of slavery and liberation. He writes:

“The Jews’ liberation from Egyptian captivity celebrated in the Passover meal happened so long ago it has become an instrument of the sacred, a mythic narrative around which Jewish identity was formed. But Afro-Americans have no ritualized way of remembering the past, no ritual to express our thankfulness for our deliverance. No ceremony takes our suffering and mixes it with our triumphs to make a balm to ease our pain. How does one repair the psychic legacy left from being traded as a commodity, managed as a business, kept illiterate by law, and brutalized at will? …

‘Because we were slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt, and the eternal, our God, brought us forth… ’ My Jewish friends recite these words every year during Passover. But my own people have no comparable way of transforming slavery from a scarlet letter to the badge of courage it should be. …

We need a black Haggadah that begins: ‘We were stolen from Africa and enslaved in America, the land of liberty … ’ And we need a time set aside when families gather for a meal and retell the tale, using a newer, truer narrative. Black history is America’s history. Being a slave is as American as George Washington and apple pie. …

If every family in America gathered yearly to celebrate the black struggle, which is the quintessential American struggle to be free, black self-esteem might well flower, and the American psyche might be transformed. For in celebrating that experience all of us would be honestly acknowledging our identity as a people. Afro-American slavery, however, like the Holocaust, remains a festering wound – a transgenerational trauma – which the years have yet to change into a redeeming narrative that transforms our slavery from a cause for shame into a source of strength.”

Memorial Day in its earliest forms met this need for a holiday naming, marking, and celebrating the African-American experience of slavery and liberation. It was not the only holiday that could have had this role. Some African-Americans celebrated Emancipation Day on January 1st, the day on which the Emancipation Proclamation came into effect. But that holiday was swamped by the much larger New Year’s Day celebrations.

Lincoln’s Birthday is still important to some African Americans. But in the general culture it has mostly disappeared, and it was always, I think, too much focused on one white man to really fulfill the need that Reverend Morrison-Reed is talking about. Juneteenth, on June 19th, celebrates the announcement of the abolition of slavery in Texas, but it has not taken off as a national holiday. Kwanzaa tries to talk more generally about history and culture and values, but it has several difficulties as a holiday, starting with its close proximity to Christmas.

Martin Luther King Day is, in my experience, the most vital African-American holiday we have. But that holiday focuses on recent history, and on one exceptional person. It is important to have heroes to look up to. But too much focus on extraordinary individuals, like Dr. King, can actually leave people feeling unempowered. Most of us cannot imagine living up to his standard. And if we imagine that progress requires having a leader of his caliber to follow, then we can feel stuck and stagnant.

And so I find myself wondering – can we go back to the original roots of Memorial Day? This holiday was started by African-Americans as a way to tell their own story. Their story of slavery, and their story of liberation. Their story of suffering, and their story of joy. Above all, their story of thankfulness.

Like the ancient Hebrews, the freed people knew that they did not accomplish their freedom by themselves, without help. They needed help from the Union government and the Union soldiers, from Abraham Lincoln, and from untold numbers of men and women who believed in justice. They also needed help from the eternal, their God. Those early Memorial Day celebrations echoed with the words of the Battle Hymn of the Republic:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. …
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His truth is marching on.
Glory, Glory, Hallelujah.

The words may seem like a cliché to us today, but for the freed people who had actually seen those circling camps the Union soldiers truly seemed like a manifestation of God’s action in the world.

Those early Memorial Day celebrations were also full of hope for the future. Imagine – three thousand schoolchildren marching at the head of the line. Like all children, they symbolized new life and new possibilities. But those children were going to school.

That was something their parents and grandparents had not dared to dream of. By 1870, five years after the war ended, the freed people would spend more than one million dollars of their own money to start and support schools for their children. That was an incredible amount of money for a people who started with literally nothing.

Those parents had such enormous pride in their children. Three thousand schoolchildren. Promising that the future would be different from the past. Learning how to write their own stories.

And so I invite you, on this Memorial Day weekend, to be part of remembering. Tell the stories you know of American slavery and American freedom. Remember the suffering not just of the slave years, but also of all the years that followed. For let there be no mistake. We in this country, whatever our individual ancestry, still bear the marks not just of slavery, but also of the generations of subjugation and fear that black Americans experienced after the end of official slavery.

Tell also the stories of liberation. The leaders born in slavery, like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. The leaders born in freedom, like William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child.

The more than two million men, both white and black, who fought in the Union armies, and the numberless women and men, both white and black, who fed and nursed them. The 360 thousand Union soldiers, both white and black, who died.

The more than four million freed people who sought to create new lives for themselves. Who demanded not retribution, but the freedom to walk the roads without fear, to be paid for their work, to build homes and families, and to send their children to school.

Tell the stories this Memorial Day. Let us no longer seek a peace that is based on forgetfulness. Instead, let us remember all the people who have fought, not just in wars but in other ways too, to put into practice that dream of liberty and justice for all.

Let us also acknowledge that the American people and the American government have not always been on the side of liberty and justice. The people of the Middle East, for example, often see us as siding with the dictators against our own professed values. They are rising because they too want liberty and justice, a decent job and a fair government.

The Egyptian people who started the demonstrations in Tahrir Square had studied the words and actions of Gandhi and King, as well as the American revolution and the French revolution, as well as the solidarity movement in Poland and Czechoslovakia’s playwright president, Vaclav Havel. They concluded that determined and principled non-violence is usually the most effective path to freedom.

We cannot create a free and just society for other people. Ultimately, the people of each country have to do that for themselves.

But we can hold up the best of American ideals. We can try to make our lives, and our world, live up to those ideals. And we can acknowledge that we have not always done so, and try again.

So this Memorial Day, let us tell the stories. Let us remember the injustice and the pain. But let us also remember the hope, the courage, the endurance, the faithfulness, the shared struggles, the dreams of freedom, the faith in an eternal spirit who is always on the side of justice. Let us tell the stories, and let us transform our heritage of slavery from a cause for shame to a source of strength.

Our final hymn will be “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” These words were written by James Weldon Johnson in 1900, thirty five years after the end of the Civil War, and they were first performed during a Lincoln’s Birthday celebration that year. African Americans throughout the country sang this song so many times that it came to be called the black national anthem. Those of you who watched Barack Obama’s inauguration may recognize that James Lowry opened his benediction by quoting its third verse. This is a song of memory.

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