Description: Thoughts too long for social media from a son of Jamaican immigrants
According to this article by Dave Roos, the earliest Memorial Day commemoration took place May 1, 1865. Formerly enslaved people and white missionaries staged a parade around the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club in Charleston, South Carolina, which during the war had been pressed into service as a prisoner-of-war camp for Union soldiers. After the mayor of Charleston surrendered on February 18, 1865 and Confederate troops left the city, newly-freed people exhumed over 260 Union soldiers from a mass gr
Like too many stories of the African-American experience of this country, it could have remained in the realm of solely oral tradition (if not lost entirely). But a Union veteran’s written remembrance and the persistence searching of historian David Blight (among others) led to a news account of the event in The New York Tribune (founded by Horace Greeley) and another in the Charleston Courier, brought this origin story of Memorial Day into the light.
Memorial Day 2023, the remembrances of American military veterans who have died will include those killed in action as part of Ukraine’s foreign legion . Malcolm Nance , a U.S. Navy veteran intelligence officer and commentator for MSNBC is perhaps the highest-profile of these volunteers, having joined the legion after his contract with MSNBC expired . He (and others) have done this as private citizens, despite repeated warnings not to do so from the Biden administration. In explaining his reasons for vo