What's Memorial Day to an Abolitionist?
What's Memorial Day to an Abolitionist?
A Radical Reclaiming, Reframing, and Rejection
I’m writing this post after a day spent grilling with my husband. Huz is what I call him. Actually, Huz did the grilling, and I did the prepping, seasoning, marinating, and sides. It’s beautiful here in the suburbs of Philadelphia, so all the windows in the house were wide open, welcoming the breeze. Thick smells of charcoal and smoke wafted into the house while the sounds of mostly 80s R&B spilled out. I sang loudly and gleefully as I sprinkled Lawry’s on the chicken, smoked paprika atop the deviled eggs, and brown sugar on the baked beans. It was a rare day of rest, save for the labor of cooking, one day after I attended the fourth annual George Floyd Memorial at City Hall in Philadelphia. The work of protesting the evils of the carceral state never stops, but sometimes, we do, and should, stop to rest, center joy, and reclaim our humanity from the systems that seek to destroy it.
As an abolitionist, it would make all the sense in the world for me to thoroughly reject Memorial Day, “an American holiday, observed on the last Monday of May, honoring the men and women who died while serving in the U.S. military.” But I don’t. Cause you know what I absolutely love? The fact that Black people are mainly responsible for this federal holiday.
The history professor said the celebration “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.” The New York Tribune described the event as “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”
SOURCE: The Overlooked Black History Of Memorial Day
Unsurprisingly, the Black origin of Memorial Day isn’t widely known and, in some cases, largely muted from the official record as History.com does here when it both acknowledges and weirdly questions the veracity of its origin.
”It is unclear where exactly this tradition originated; numerous different communities may have independently initiated the memorial gatherings. And some records show 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. Nevertheless, in 1966 the federal government declared Waterloo, New York, the official birthplace of Memorial Day.”
SOURCE: Memorial Day
Origins aside, you know what I love even more about this holiday? It’s the way Black people have essentially said: REMIX! Growing up, I didn’t even realize Memorial Day was supposed to honor those who died while serving in the U.S. military because our family decorated the graves of EVERY family member we’d lost, not just those who served and died in battle. My mother and aunts decorated the grave of my grandfather, who fought but didn’t die (at least not physically) in the Korean War, and later the graves of my older brother, my cousins, aunts, and uncles. Somewhere along the way, Black folk either intentionally or intuitively rejected the state’s framing of this day. In noting the holiday’s origins, Twitter user @AfricanaCarr said: “South Carolina Africans did what We do: Pay respect to Ancestors.”
Although my mother did dress me and my sister in matching red, white, and blue outfits adorned with the American flag, for me, my family, and almost every Black person I’ve ever known, Memorial Day is most known and treasured as the designated time to fire up the grill and gather in someone’s backyard or the park. It is a day reserved for family, fun (spades or bid whist for the adults, sparklers for the kids), and fellowship as we take the increasingly rare opportunity to spend time with loved ones.
And that is the only way I can participate in this holiday, reclaimed with new meaning. As a lifelong pacifist, I have something lower than contempt for war and all of its slick associated propaganda. And as an abolitionist, I reject the state’s purpose for this day. When it comes to Memorial Day, I reject the reasons the state calls us to celebrate a lie, as my Grandma would say, “from the pit of hell.”
While the state claims to venerate members of the military today, be clear that the United States is responsible for destroying the very lives it feigns to honor. Ultimately, it is not about individuals who sacrificed their lives at all. This holiday is a guise to celebrate war as necessary and noble. It is not.
No one deserves to die in service to nations and systems that value none of us. I grieve and honor those on both sides of the gun, those who sacrifice their lives for imperialist powers that could give a hot damn about the life of the soldier or the so-called enemy.
I reject this holiday as a tool of propaganda that normalizes the violence and destruction war inflicts. The violence we are socialized to think is necessary, normal, and acceptable. The same violence responsible for the physical destruction of some and the moral destruction of us all.
We have been witnessing the horrors of war play out in increasingly gruesome detail since October 2023. And this weekend, we are watching the horrific images coming out of Rafah, a massacre being billed by war criminal Netanyahu as a “tragic mistake.”
Fire rages following an Israeli strike on an area designated for displaced Palestinians in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on 26 May (Reuters)
We must reject both the lies and propaganda associated with this holiday. They have given rise to an acceptance of the atrocities we are witnessing in Gaza, in Sudan, and in Congo. But what we are seeing is the revelation that genocide is not a historical artifact. It is happening now and is as real as the silence and complicity of both our government and many of our friends and neighbors who are excusing a literal genocide while supporting their excuses with lies and propaganda that claim the war against Palestinians and the imperialist, capitalist, White Supremacist underpinnings of the wars in Congo and the Sudan are right, necessary, and normal. They are not. We are always and always worse for war.
Happy Day today. I hope it is filled with some rest, some ‘cue, some love, and, more than anything, a radical reframing of all the ways the state peddles violence here and around the world as an acceptable truth.
Free Palestine! Free Congo! Free Sudan! Free us all from the tyranny of a world that needs abolition now.
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Don’t forget to register for our monthly book discussion via Zoom on Wednesday, May 29th at 6:00 PM Eastern. We are looking forward to seeing you all!
In solidarity,
Alan & connease