Welcome to your Memorial Day Open Thread. Hope that you all have been contributing to Delaware’s economy by going to the beach with your family or getting your friends together to help you build an outdoor kitchen to your house.
This interesting bit of new history has been discussed in several places this week:
According to Yale history professor David Blight, African Americans in Charleston, S.C., launched the first Memorial Day celebration in 1865, three years before the commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic called on Union veterans’ organizations to decorate the graves of dead soldiers.[…]
Following the Confederate surrender, which ended the Civil War, blacks went to the place where hundreds of prisoners had been buried, many in mass graves. “Blacks, many of them recently freed slaves, buried the soldiers properly. They put up a fence around the area and painted it. More than 260 were buried there. We don’t know the names. We don’t know the race,” Blight told BlackAmericaWeb.com.
Last year, President Obama rejected the calls for him to stop the tradition of sending a wreath to the Confederate Memorial at Arlington, but started a new one (I hope) of sending a wreath to the monument that honors the service of African-American soldiers during the Civil War. I’m hoping that tradition is maintained this year. But both President and Mrs. Obama will be attending the ceremonies at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier today; this memorial is also the site of an official observance of a national moment of silence at 2:55 this afternoon.
And while we rightfully remember and honor the service and sacrifices of those who worked to defend this country, it is also a good time to ask when we can bestow the honor of ending asking for these sacrifices from American men and women:
This Memorial Day, I ask you all to take a moment to read the news and to imagine those who have been asked to say goodbye to their loved ones. If you feel the same as I do, that the casualties and sorrow of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have caused enough loss to our young people and their families, then consider asking your representatives in Congress, “Why?” Ask them when we, as a nation filled with veterans, can finally live a life that is truly peaceful, without war, and without so many soldiers dying in far reaches of the world.