On Memorial Day 2022, we take a look at the African American origins of the federal holiday established to remember America’s fallen soldiers.

Although May 30, 1868 is cited as the first national commemoration of Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery, events lead by African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina to decorate the graves of fallen Civil War soldiers occurred on May 1, 1865, less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered.

Reports of this early version of Memorial Day or “Decoration Day” as it was called, were rediscovered in the Harvard University archives in the late 1990s by historian David Blight, author of the 2018 biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.

To quote from history.com:

When Charleston fell and Confederate troops evacuated the badly damaged city, those freed from enslavement remained. One of the first things those emancipated men and women did was to give the fallen Union prisoners a proper burial. They exhumed the mass grave and reinterred the bodies in a new cemetery with a tall, whitewashed fence inscribed with the words: “Martyrs of the Race Course.” And then on May 1, 1865, something even more extraordinary happened. According to two reports that Blight found in The New York Tribune and The Charleston Courier, a crowd of 10,000 people, mostly freed slaves with some white missionaries, staged a parade around the race track. Three thousand Black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and sang “John Brown’s Body.” Members of the famed 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments were in attendance and performed double-time marches. Black ministers recited verses from the Bible. Despite the size of the gathering and newspaper coverage, the memory of this event was “suppressed by white Charlestonians in favor of their own version of the day,” Blight stated in the New York Times in 2011.

On May 31, 2010, near a reflecting pool at Hampton Park, the city of Charleston reclaimed this history by installing a plaque commemorating the site as the place where Blacks held the first Memorial Day on May 1, 1865.

During the dedication of the plaque, the city’s mayor at the time, Joe Riley, was present to celebrate the historic occasion which included a brass band and a reenactment of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment.

In 2017, the City of Charleston erected yet another sign reclaiming the history and commemorating the event:

“On May 1, 1865 a parade to honor the Union war dead took place here. The event marked the earliest celebration of what became known as “Memorial Day.” The crowd numbered in the thousands, with African American school children from newly formed Freedmen’s Schools leading the parade. They were followed by church leaders, Freedpeople, Unionists, and members of the 54th Massachusetts 34th and 104th U.S. Colored Infantries. The dead were later reinterred in Beaufort.”

To learn more about African Americans’ role in the creation of Memorial Day, check out the links to sources provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.

This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, written, produced and hosted by me, Lori Lakin Hutcherson.

For more Good Black News, check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.

Sources:

https://www.history.com/news/memorial-day-civil-war-slavery-charleston

https://www.lx.com/black-legacy/dont-overlook-memorial-days-black-southern-roots/53453/

https://www.live5news.com/2020/02/18/charleston-claims-first-memorial-day-celebration-with-african-americans-playing-significant-role/

https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2022/05/28/freed-slaves-started-first-memorial-day-in-the-us/

https://aaregistry.org/story/the-first-american-memorial-day-is-commemorated/

https://www.harlemworldmagazine.com/memorial-day-african-americans-memorial-day-charleston-south-carolina-1865/

How "Decoration Day" in May 1865, Held by African Americans in South Carolina Led to Memorial Day

How “Decoration Day” in May 1865, Held by African Americans in South Carolina Led to Memorial Day

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson) On Memorial Day 2022, we take a look at the African American origins of the federal holiday established to remember America’s fallen soldiers. To read about it, read on. To hear about it, press PLAY: https://goodblacknews.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/GBNPADpod053022.mp3 [You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through…

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Events 2.12

1404 – The Italian professor Galeazzo di Santa Sophie performed the first post-mortem autopsy for the purposes of teaching and demonstration at the Heiligen–Geist Spital in Vienna. 1429 – English forces under Sir John Fastolf defend a supply convoy carrying rations to the army besieging Orléans in the Battle of the Herrings. 1502 – Isabella I issues an edict outlawing Islam in the Crown of Castile, forcing virtually all her Muslim subjects to convert to Christianity. 1502 – Vasco da Gama sets sail with 15 ships and 800 men from Lisbon, Portugal on his second voyage to India. 1541 – Santiago, Chile is founded by Pedro de Valdivia. 1593 – Japanese invasion of Korea: Approximately 3,000 Joseon defenders led by general Kwon Yul successfully repel more than 30,000 Japanese forces in the Siege of Haengju. 1689 – The Convention Parliament declares that the flight to France in 1688 by James II, the last Roman Catholic British monarch, constitutes an abdication. 1733 – Georgia Day: Englishman James Oglethorpe founds Georgia, the 13th colony of the Thirteen Colonies, by settling at Savannah. 1771 – Gustav III becomes the King of Sweden. 1817 – An Argentine/Chilean patriotic army, after crossing the Andes, defeats Spanish troops at the Battle of Chacabuco. 1818 – Bernardo O'Higgins formally approves the Chilean Declaration of Independence near Concepción, Chile. 1825 – The Creek cede the last of their lands in Georgia to the United States government by the Treaty of Indian Springs, and migrate west. 1832 – Ecuador annexes the Galápagos Islands. 1855 – Michigan State University is established. 1889 – Antonín Dvořák's Jakobín is premiered at National Theater in Prague 1894 – Anarchist Émile Henry hurls a bomb into the Cafe Terminus in Paris, killing one person and wounding 20. 1909 – The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is founded. 1909 – New Zealand's worst maritime disaster of the 20th century happens when the SS Penguin, an inter-island ferry, sinks and explodes at the entrance to Wellington Harbour. 1912 – The Xuantong Emperor, the last Emperor of China, abdicates. 1915 – In Washington, D.C., the first stone of the Lincoln Memorial is put into place. 1919 – The Second Regional Congress of Peasants, Workers and Insurgents is held by the Makhnovshchina at Huliaipole. 1921 – Bolsheviks launch a revolt in Georgia as a preliminary to the Red Army invasion of Georgia. 1924 – George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue received its premiere in a concert titled "An Experiment in Modern Music", in Aeolian Hall, New York, by Paul Whiteman and his band, with Gershwin playing the piano. 1935 – USS Macon, one of the two largest helium-filled airships ever created, crashes into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California and sinks. 1946 – World War II: Operation Deadlight ends after scuttling 121 of 154 captured U-boats. 1946 – African American United States Army veteran Isaac Woodard is severely beaten by a South Carolina police officer to the point where he loses his vision in both eyes. The incident later galvanizes the civil rights movement and partially inspires Orson Welles' film Touch of Evil. 1947 – The largest observed iron meteorite until that time creates an impact crater in Sikhote-Alin, in the Soviet Union. 1947 – Christian Dior unveils a "New Look", helping Paris regain its position as the capital of the fashion world. 1961 – The Soviet Union launches Venera 1 towards Venus. 1963 – Construction begins on the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri. 1963 – Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 705 crashes into the Everglades shortly after takeoff from Miami International Airport, killing all 45 people on board. 1965 – Malcolm X visits Smethwick near Birmingham following the racially-charged 1964 United Kingdom general election. 1968 – Phong Nhị and Phong Nhất massacre. 1974 – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, is exiled from the Soviet Union. 1983 – One hundred women protest in Lahore, Pakistan against military dictator Zia-ul-Haq's proposed Law of Evidence. The women were tear-gassed, baton-charged and thrown into lock-up. The women were successful in repealing the law. 1988 – Cold War: The 1988 Black Sea bumping incident: The U.S. missile cruiser USS Yorktown (CG-48) is intentionally rammed by the Soviet frigate Bezzavetnyy in the Soviet territorial waters, while Yorktown claims innocent passage. 1990 – Carmen Lawrence becomes the first female Premier in Australian history when she becomes Premier of Western Australia. 1992 – The current Constitution of Mongolia comes into effect. 1993 – Two-year-old James Bulger is abducted from New Strand Shopping Centre by two ten-year-old boys, who later torture and murder him. 1994 – Four thieves break into the National Gallery of Norway and steal Edvard Munch's iconic painting The Scream. 1999 – United States President Bill Clinton is acquitted by the United States Senate in his impeachment trial. 2001 – NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft touches down in the "saddle" region of 433 Eros, becoming the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid. 2002 – The trial of Slobodan Milošević, the former President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, begins at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. He dies four years later before its conclusion. 2002 – An Iran Airtour Tupolev Tu-154 crashes in the mountains outside Khorramabad, Iran while descending for a landing at Khorramabad Airport, killing 119. 2004 – The city of San Francisco begins issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in response to a directive from Mayor Gavin Newsom. 2009 – Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashes into a house in Clarence Center, New York while on approach to Buffalo Niagara International Airport, killing all on board and one on the ground. 2016 – Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill sign an Ecumenical Declaration in the first such meeting between leaders of the Catholic and Russian Orthodox Churches since their split in 1054. 2019 – The country known as the Republic of Macedonia renames itself the Republic of North Macedonia in accordance with the Prespa agreement, settling a long-standing naming dispute with Greece.

#Repost @olmecian • • • • • • #Repost @moorinformation ・・・ “#MemorialDay was started by former #African slaves on May, 1, 1865, in #Charleston, S.C., to honor 257 dead Union soldiers who had been buried in a mass grave in an upscale race track converted into a #Confederate prison camp. They dug up the bodies and worked for two weeks to give them a proper burial as gratitude for fighting for their freedom. They then held a parade of 10,000 people led by 3,000 Black children, where they marched, sang and celebrated.” #moorinfo via: @moorinfo2 #olmecian *********** From Huffington Post On May 1, 1865, freed slaves gathered in Charleston, South Carolina to commemorate the death of Union soldiers and the end of the American Civil War. Three years later, General John Logan issued a special order that May 30, 1868 be observed as Decoration Day, the first Memorial Day — a day set aside “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land.” At the time, the nation was reunited politically, but it remained culturally divided, and so did Memorial Day observations. In the North, the federal government created national cemeteries for men who died in the war, while state governments from New York to Michigan gradually made Decoration Day an official holiday throughout the 1870s. In the South, from April to June, women dressed in white and knelt beneath statues of fallen Confederate leaders; they told stories about the men who appeared in portraits lining the walls of many Southern homes. By the early 20th century, as Americans faced enemies abroad, many of the surviving Civil War veterans recognized their shared wartime history and reconciled their differences — turning Memorial Day into a national holiday. #memorial #history #memorialdayweekend #blackhistory #huffingtonpost https://www.instagram.com/p/Bx-FhIDl4DH/?igshid=1oef7ts9i7cs

1815 Cuffe arrives at Sherbrooke Island in present day Sierra Leone with 88 African Americans, the first. 1816 December The American Colonization Society is established. 1820 The ship Elizabeth sails from New York to Sierra Leone and Liberia with 88 emigrants. and 22 emigrants die within 3 weeks from yellow fever and of the 4, 571 emigrants brought to Liberia between this year and 1843 only 1, 819 survive. 1821 Lt. Robert Stockton points a pistol to King Peter’s head and King Peter sells Cape Mersurado. 1822 January 7 The emigrants brought to Sherbrooke Island by Cuffe are taken to Cape Mersurado by another ship and there they establish the city of Christopolis. 1824 The city of Christopolis is renamed Monrovia after President James Monroe. 1825 King Peter and other Kings sign a treaty with Ashmun granting land and are given 3 barrels of rum, 5 caskets 1829 March Jamaican John Brown Russworm co founder of the first African American owned newspaper, “Freedoms Journal” emigrates from the U. S. to Liberia. 1830 Russwurm found employment as the colonial secretary for the American Colonization Society serving from until 1834 and also worked as the editor of the Liberia Herald and served as the superintendent of education in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia. 1836 Russwurm becomes the first black governor of the Maryland in Africa colony which was annexed Liberia in 1857. 1845 The ACS draft a constitution at a convention held in Monrovia. 1847 Liberia delcares its independence becoming an independent and sovereign Republic using the constitution. 1848 January 3 Joseph Jenkins Roberts is elected Liberia’s first president. 1850 Edward Wilmot Blyden at age 18 emigrates to Liberia after unsuccessfully enrolling in Rutgers Theological College as well as 2 other theological colleges in the U.S. Blyden had made the trip to the U.S. with the wife of John P. Knox, pastor of St. Thomas Protestant Dutch Reformed Church. The state of Virginia begin to put aside $30, 000 every year until 1855 to support emigration. Blyden edits the Liberia Herald and writes the column “A Voice From Bleeding Africa”. 1859 May Martin Delany, whos own paternal descent was that of Goan sails from New York to Liberia where he and chiefs in the Abeokuta region make an agreement similarly to for to unused land. Earlier that same year Delany had published parts of Blake: Or The Huts of America in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, in which he criticized for inaccurately portraying the slaves as too passive although for cruelty of Southern slave owners, the first half of part one is serialised in The Anglo-African Magazine between January to July. 1860 Delany leaves Liberia for England and there he is honoured by the International Statistical Congress, and returns to America shortly. 1835 Delany attends the National Negro Convention in Philadelphia. 1843 Delany begins publishing The Mystery black newspaper, his articles and writings are reprinted in William Lloyd Garrisons “The Liberator” and also meets and marries Catherine A. Richards Pittsburgh. 1846 Delany is sued $650 for libel by an African American, Fiddler Johnson, who he accused in The Mystery newspaper of being a slave catcher. 1847 Delany meets Douglass and Garrison whilst they are in Pittsburgh on an anti-slavery tour and helps to put together Douglass’s first abolitionist newspaper “the North Star”, printed from the basement of the Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Rochester, New York. Delanys eulogy for Rev. Fayette Davis is widely redistributed. Delany recruits for the Union Army. His son Touissant Louverture Delany serves with the 54th regiment. 1848 July Delany reports in the North Star that the jury in the Crosswait trial were instructed by U.S. District Court Justice John McLean to make it a punishable offence for a citizen to thwart those trying to “repossess” an alleged runaway slave, and as a result influences abolitionist Salmon P. Chase to remove McLean as a candidate of the Free Soil Party for the Presidency. 1850 Delany becomes one of the first of three black men to attend Harvard Medical School but is dismissed in after a few weeks on account of a race complaint from white students. 1852 Delany publishes his The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered. 1854 Delany publishes The Origins and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry: Its Introduction into the United States and Legitimacy among Colored Men. Delany, in the second Cholera outbreak stays behind in Pittsburgh to treat patients whilst many leave the city. August Dealany leads the National Emigration Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. and publishes his “Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent”. 1856 Delany moves his family to Chatham, Ontario, Canada. 1861 Delanys second part of part one series is published in Weekly Anglo African Magazine, he also prepares to embark Abeokuta but abandon plans abolition Delany begins recruiting black men for the Union Army Rhode Island, Connecticut and Ohio raising thousands of enlistees many joining the new United States Coloured Troops, his son serving in the 54th regiment, writes to secretary of war Edwin Stanton 179, 000 black men enlisting in the U.S. Coloured Troops making up almost 10% of those serving in the Union army. 1865 February Delany meets Abraham Lincoln and proposes the creation of a Corps of black men led by black officers to attract blacks in the south. Delany becomes the first black line field officer in the U.S. Army as well as the only black officer to receive commission of the highest rank of Major during the Civil War. April 14 Delany invited to the War Department ceremony in Charleston, South Carolina, attending with Robert Vesey son of hanged black abolitionist, Denmark Vesey in ship named the Planter former slave Robert Smalls, Major Genral Robert Anderson Fort Sumter 1861, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison Senator Warner speak, Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher. 1861 Blyden becomes professor of Greek and Latin at Liberia College and becomes Liberian Secretary of State. 1877 Delany became chairman of the Liberian Exodus Joint Steamship Company finance committee they bought the 400 ton ship Azor. 1878 The following year the company made the voyage from Charleston to Monrovia with captain Harrison N. Bouey. Blyden serves as President of Liberia College for 4 years. 1887 Blyden publishes his Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. 1895 17 years later Bishop Henry Mc. Turner was responsible for two ships with 500 emigrants sailing to Liberia in 1895 and 1896. The year after he also received James Mata Dwane of South Africa along with H. B. Parks and J. S. Flipper. Dwane previously a South African Methodist Minister had left the Methodist Church to join the Ethiopian Church of Mangena Mokone in the same year and was also the founder of the Order of Ethiopia in the Anglican Church.

History is the polemics of the victor, William F. Buckley once said. Not so in the United States, at least not regarding the Civil War. As soon as the Confederates laid down their arms, some picked up their pens and began to distort what they had done and why. The resulting mythology took hold of the nation a generation later and persists — which is why a presidential candidate can suggest, as Michele Bachmann did in 2011, that slavery was somehow pro-family and why the public, per the Pew Research Center, believes that the war was fought mainly over states’ rights.

The Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they could not win on the battlefield: the cause of white supremacy and the dominant understanding of what the war was all about. We are still digging ourselves out from under the misinformation they spread, which has manifested in our public monuments and our history books.

Take Kentucky, where the legislature voted not to secede. Early in the war, Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston ventured through the western part of the state and found “no enthusiasm, as we imagined and hoped, but hostility.” Eventually, 90,000 Kentuckians would fight for the United States, while 35,000 fought for the Confederate States. Nevertheless, according to historian Thomas Clark, the state now has 72 Confederate monuments and only two Union ones.

Neo-Confederates also won parts of Maryland. In 1913, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) put a soldier on a pedestal at the Rockville courthouse. Maryland, which did not secede, sent 24,000 men to the Confederate armed forces, but it also sent 63,000 to the U.S. Army and Navy. Still, the UDC’s monument tells visitors to take the other side: “To our heroes of Montgomery Co. Maryland: That we through life may not forget to love the thin gray line.”

In fact, the thin gray line came through Montgomery and adjoining Frederick counties at least three times, en route to Antietam, Gettysburg and Washington. Robert E. Lee’s army expected to find recruits and help with food, clothing and information. It didn’t. Instead, Maryland residents greeted Union soldiers as liberators when they came through on the way to Antietam. Recognizing the residents of Frederick as hostile, Confederate cavalry leader Jubal Early ransomed $200,000 from them lest he burn their town, a sum equal to about $3 million today. But Frederick now boasts a Confederate memorial, and the manager of the town’s cemetery — filled with Union and Confederate dead — told me, “Very little is done on the Union side” around Memorial Day. “It’s mostly Confederate.”

Neo-Confederates didn’t just win the battle of public monuments. They managed to rename the war, calling it the War Between the States, a locution born after the conflict that was among the primary ways to refer to the war in the middle of the 20th century, after which it began to fade. Even “Jeopardy!” has used this language.

Perhaps most perniciously, neo-Confederates now claim that the South seceded over states’ rights. Yet when each state left the Union, its leaders made clear that they were seceding because they were for slavery and against states’ rights. In its “Declaration of the Causes Which Impel the State of Texas to Secede From the Federal Union,” for example, the secession convention of Texas listed the states that had offended the delegates: “Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa.” Governments there had exercised states’ rights by passing laws that interfered with the federal government’s attempts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Some no longer let slave owners “transit” across their territory with slaves. “States’ rights” were what Texas was seceding against. Texas also made clear what it was seceding for — white supremacy:

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

Despite such statements, neo-Confederates erected monuments that flatly lied about the Confederate cause. For example, South Carolina’s monument at Gettysburg, dedicated in 1963, claims to explain why the state seceded: “Abiding faith in the sacredness of states rights provided their creed here.” This tells us nothing about 1863, when abiding opposition to states’ rights provided the Palmetto State’s creed. In 1963, however, its leaders did support states’ rights; politicians tried desperately that decade to keep the federal government from enforcing school desegregation and civil rights.

So thoroughly did this mythology take hold that our textbooks still stand history on its head and say secession was for, rather than against, states’ rights. Publishers mystify secession because they don’t want to offend Southern school districts and thereby lose sales. Consider this passage from “The American Journey,” probably the largest textbook ever foisted on middle school students and perhaps the best-selling U.S. history textbook:

The South Secedes

Lincoln and the Republicans had promised not to disturb slavery where it already existed. Nevertheless, many people in the South mistrusted the party, fearing that the Republican government would not protect Southern rights and liberties. On December 20, 1860, the South’s long-standing threat to leave the Union became a reality when South Carolina held a special convention and voted to secede.

The section reads as if slavery was not the reason for secession. Instead, the rationale is completely vague: White Southerners feared for their “rights and liberties.” On the next page, the authors are more precise: White Southerners claimed that since “the national government” had been derelict ” — by refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and by denying the Southern states equal rights in the territories — the states were justified in leaving the Union.”

“Journey” offers no evidence to support this claim. It cannot. No Southern state made any such charge against the federal government in any secession document I have ever seen. Abraham Lincoln’s predecessors, James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce, were part of the pro-Southern wing of the Democratic Party. For 10 years, the federal government had vigorously enforced the Fugitive Slave Act. Buchanan supported pro-slavery forces in Kansas even after his own minion, territorial governor and former Mississippi slave owner Robert Walker, ruled that they had won an election only by fraud. The seven states that seceded before Lincoln took office had no quarrel with “the national government.”

Teaching or implying that the Confederate states seceded for states’ rights is not accurate history. It is white, Confederate-apologist history. “Journey,” like other U.S. textbooks, needs to be de-Confederatized. So does the history test we give to immigrants who want to become U.S. citizens. Item No. 74 asks them to “name one problem that led to the Civil War.” It then gives three acceptable answers: slavery, economic reasons and states’ rights. (No other question on this 100-item test has more than one right answer.) If by “economic reasons” it means issues with tariffs and taxes, which most people infer, then two of its three “correct answers” are wrong.

The legacy of this thinking pervades Washington, too. The dean of the Washington National Cathedral has noted that some of its stained-glass windows memorialize Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. There’s a statue of Albert Pike, Confederate general and reputed leader of the Arkansas Ku Klux Klan, in Judiciary Square.

The Army runs Fort A.P. Hill, named for a Confederate general whose men killed African American soldiers after they surrendered; Fort Bragg, named for a general who was not only Confederate but also incompetent; and Fort Benning, named for a general who, after he helped get his home state of Georgia to secede, made the following argument to the Virginia legislature:

What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction . . . that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery. . . . If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain that slavery is to be abolished. . . . By the time the North shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. . . . The consequence will be that our men will be all exterminated or expelled to wander as vagabonds over a hostile Earth, and as for our women, their fate will be too horrible to contemplate even in fancy.

With our monuments lying about secession, our textbooks obfuscating what the Confederacy was about and our Army honoring Southern generals, no wonder so many Americans supported the Confederacy until recently. We can see the impact of Confederate symbols and thinking on Dylann Roof, accused of killing nine in a Charleston, S.C., church, but other examples abound. In his mugshot, Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, wore a neo-Confederate T-shirt showing Abraham Lincoln and the words “Sic semper tyrannis.” When white students in Appleton, Wis. — a recovering “sundown town” that for decades had been all white on purpose — had issues with Mexican American students in 1999, they responded by wearing and waving Confederate flags, which they already had at home, at the ready.

Across the country, removing slavery from its central role in prompting the Civil War marginalizes African Americans and makes us all stupid. De-Confederatizing the United States won’t end white supremacy, but it will be a momentous step in that direction.

Also, I urge you to take a look at these awful monuments at Vice.com:

Yup, America Still Has a Ton of Racist Monuments (December 13, 2015)

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/politics/for-democrats-stacey-abrams-sends-key-message-on-gender-and-race-in-sotu-response/

For Democrats, Stacey Abrams sends key message on gender and race in SOTU response

Compared to those chosen for the politically challenging role in the past, Stacey Abrams, set to deliver the Democratic response to the president’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, certainly bucks tradition.

Most notably, Abrams will be the first-ever African-American woman to give the formal response to a president’s address, according to archival research from both the House and Senate historians.

And even though she lost a tight race for Georgia governor last November, Abrams was nevertheless selected to be the face of the party in a speech seen by millions nationwide — a testament, experts say, to the power Democrats believe Abrams holds to connect with a diverse electorate in a moment of American politics enveloped by the complexities of gender and race.

Moreover, in the aftermath of reports of racist photos involving Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, Abrams’ words will be increasingly in the spotlight.

“I know there were some headlines that characterized her as the future of the Democratic Party. In my estimate, she is the present and the future. She’s shaping the future,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who in 2018 became the first African-American woman to represent Massachusetts in Congress, said in an interview with ABC News.

And while Abrams’ defining characteristics set her apart, they also match her up for the current, unpredictable era — one in which the State of the Union is pushed back after a historic government shutdown, and the president giving the address had never held elected office himself before taking office.

“I think it’s untraditional in all the right ways — and ways voters are showing themselves to have an appetite for,” said Jamila Michener, a professor at Cornell University who researches racial inequality and the electoral system. Particularly African-American women, Michener said, who are “the electoral bedrock of the Democratic Party.”

“It’s almost a kind of ‘duh’ moment for the Democrats, and one it’s good they finally had,” she said.

John Amis/AP, FILE

Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams addresses supporters during an election night watch party in Atlanta, Nov. 6, 2018.

Giving the rebuttal will be a notch on a long resume of groundbreaking roles for Abrams, who was the first African-American woman to be nominated for governor by a major political party and the first woman to lead a party in the Georgia Statehouse.

She also was the first-ever recipient of the Gabrielle Giffords Rising Star Award, an award for rising women in public service.

That was how she met her close friend — the aforementioned history-maker — Pressley, who received the award the following year.

“Stacey has many times had history-maker attached to her name,” Pressley said, speaking with ABC News a few days before the address. “But I don’t think she set out to make it. I don’t think she ever set out to be the first anything.”

“I think she’s been enthusiastically received because the electorate is clamoring for truth tellers and justice seekers and grassroots foot soldiers and visionary architects — and those are all the things that Stacey embodies,” Pressley said of her friend.

Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley addresses the crowd during the 49th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Breakfast in Boston, Jan. 21, 2019.

Pressley, like Abrams, is credited with expanding the electorate in 2018 in a way that lit up the Democratic Party, providing momentum for 2020.

“Her race, like mine, did expand the electorate and so it’s easy to make that just about votes, but really it was about engaging voices,” Pressley said. “New people are feeling heard and seen in the first time ever.”

Democrats are keenly aware of the power of mobilizing African-American voters across the country — a factor that gave Sen. Bernie Sanders a boost in his presidential campaign in 2016 and hampered Hillary Clinton’s run. And when Democrats took back the House in the midterms, exit polls showed black women voted for Democrats at higher rates than any other group.

In traditionally red, Southern states like Alabama, where 98 percent of black women brought Democrat Doug Jones over the victory line with their votes in 2017, or in Georgia and Florida, where both Abrams and Democratic candidate for Florida governor Andrew Gillum came close to victories in 2018, Democrats continued to see the impact of connecting with the black community.

For both Abrams and Gillum, those races also took on bigger causes of voter suppression — allegations of which led to lawsuits and the creation of Abrams’ group, Fair Fight Georgia, which focuses on improving the state’s election system.

Let me be clear: We won in Alabama and Virginia because #BlackWomen led us to victory. Black women are the backbone of the Democratic Party, and we can’t take that for granted. Period.

— Tom Perez (@TomPerez) December 13, 2017

That’s why even losses — such as in the cases of Gillum and Abrams — have Democrats excited.

“They fell short but look what they did in coming close,” said Democratic strategist and former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee Donna Brazile in an interview with ABC News just before Democrats announced Abrams as their pick for the rebuttal.

“They expanded the electorate, they made it possible for the next person who gets on the ballot to win — and they also wrote a new political playbook that I think Democrats have to work on, and that is the campaign has to be about you and not your opponent,” Brazile said.

Pressley, who said she initially worried that a decisive margin of victory for Democrats in 2018 would allow the party to be less introspective, pointed to picking Abrams as a sign the party was still moving forward.

Paul Sancya/AP, FILE

Donna Brazile speaks during the second day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 26, 2016.

“The fact that Stacey Abrams will be delivering the State of the Union response is an early and encouraging indicator to me that we are taking stock of those lessons learned,” Pressley said.

And experts say choosing Abrams, despite her loss in 2018, sends a unique message that the party doesn’t intend to let that energy go.

“The Democrats aren’t going to leave that money on the table,” Michener said.

“There are some real rewards at stake here. It’s crucial for the Democratic Party at this point to decide what sorts of voices they want to represent and what sorts of inroads they want to make as far as the party being optimally inclusive,” she said.

Keneshia Grant, an assistant professor of political science at Howard University who studies race and the electoral system, pointed out the important timing of this speech, coming out of 2018 and heading into 2020.

“We can kind of see the Democratic Party — in the people, the candidates — are thinking about black voters,” Grant said, mentioning the early focus 2020 presidential candidates are placing on states like South Carolina, where a majority of those casting ballots will be African-American.

“Choosing Abrams is in line with that idea that black voters matter,” Grant said.

That being said, Abrams is up against a tough challenge.

The rebuttal is no walk in the park. It’s taken victims, whether it’s because of awkwardly interjected sips of water, overused chapstick, or the premise of rebutting the person in the highest held position of elected office in the U.S.

A little advice for @staceyabrams as she prepares our Democratic rebuttal: -Be yourself, you’ll crush it -He’ll talk longer than you expect so keep snacks handy -Be the fighter we know you are -Misplace your chapstick -You have millions of Americans standing with you Good luck!

— Rep. Joe Kennedy III (@RepJoeKennedy) January 29, 2019

And in the age of President Donald Trump, experts also say Abrams also needs to unify across all demographics, a challenge she has acknowledged.

One way to go about it? Don’t go straight for Trump, Grant said, mirroring Brazile’s advice for Democrats to focus on themselves and not their opponents. “I think the things she stands for are already in direct conflict with what he stands for,” she said.

“I don’t think it’s as tricky as you might think,” Pressley said. “Stacey Abrams is just a sharp contrast in every way of the current occupant of the White House — and that is not only immediately true, visually, but it is also true in how she presents, in how she engages.”

Paul Sancya/AP, FILE

Donna Brazile speaks during the second day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 26, 2016.

Another challenge may come if some voters see Abrams as a pick that qualifies as “identity politics,” Michener said, a point of sharp criticism of the party after the 2016 presidential elections for voters who thought too much focus on marginalized groups fractured the party.

It’s a factor Abrams — who has argued instead that “identity politics” strengthen Democracy — has pushed back on, writing in a recent essay that her campaign built an “unprecedented coalition of people of color, rural whites, suburban dwellers, and young people in the Deep South by articulating an understanding of each group’s unique concerns instead of trying to create a false image of universality.”

“In my bid for office, I intentionally and vigorously highlighted communities of color and other marginalized groups, not to the exclusion of others but as a recognition of their specific policy needs,” Abrams wrote in the essay.

The essay was published days after Abrams was announced as the Democrats’ pick for the rebuttal.

“It’s interesting to me that Democrats took that really hard thing to do [the rebuttal speech] and they gave that platform to a massively successful African-American, who appeals in ways Democrats might want to come forth, but also risks highlighting some of the division the party is fighting,” Michener said.

But, Michener pointed out, without risks, there are no rewards.

The role will “require more of her than it would if she weren’t an African American woman,” Michener said. “But if starting at a disadvantage was a disqualifier for black women, then we shouldn’t do anything at all,” she added.

Remember and Honor our Fallen Soldiers Memorial Day is an American holiday, observed on the last Monday of May, #honoring the men and women who died while serving in the U.S. #military. Originally known as #DecorationDay, it originated in the years following the #CivilWar and became an official federal holiday in 1971. Many Americans observe #MemorialDay by visiting cemeteries or memorials, holding #family gatherings and participating in parades. Unofficially, it marks the beginning of the summer season. #didyouknow The earliest commemorations was organized by recently freed African Americans? As the Civil War neared its end, thousands of Union soldiers, held as prisoners of war, were herded into a series of hastily assembled camps in Charleston, South Carolina. Conditions at one camp, a former racetrack near the city’s Citadel, were so bad that more than 250 prisoners died from disease or exposure, and were buried in a mass grave behind the track’s grandstand.  #Black workmen gathered and reinterred the bodies of Union prisoners of war buried there, decorated their graves, built a high fence around the cemetery, “whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance.” Later that day, they “staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. The procession was led by 3,000 Black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses. Several hundred Black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses.” #everythanculture #podcast #inclusion #history #america #holidays (at Seattle, Washington) https://www.instagram.com/p/CPi93HPF1jr/?utm_medium=tumblr

Nowadays, Memorial Day honors veterans of all wars, but its roots are in America’s deadliest conflict, the Civil War. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died, about two-thirds from disease.

The work of honoring the dead began right away all over the country, and several American towns claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day. Researchers have traced the earliest annual commemoration to women who laid flowers on soldiers’ graves in the Civil War hospital town of Columbus, Miss., in April 1866. But historians like the Pulitzer Prize winner David Blight have tried to raise awareness of freed slaves who decorated soldiers’ graves a year earlier, to make sure their story gets told too.

Clubhouse at the race course where Union soldiers were held prisoner.

Civil war photographs, 1861-1865, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

In the approximately 10 days leading up to the event, roughly two dozen African American Charlestonians reorganized the graves into rows and built a 10-foot-tall white fence around them. An archway overhead spelled out “Martyrs of the Race Course” in black letters.

About 10,000 people, mostly black residents, participated in the May 1 tribute, according to coverage back then in the Charleston Daily Courier and the New York Tribune. Starting at 9 a.m., about 3,000 black schoolchildren paraded around the race track holding roses and singing the Union song “John Brown’s Body,” and were followed by adults representing aid societies for freed black men and women. Black pastors delivered sermons and led attendees in prayer and in the singing of spirituals, and there were picnics. James Redpath, the white director of freedman’s education in the region, organized about 30 speeches by Union officers, missionaries and black ministers. Participants sang patriotic songs like “America” and “We’ll Rally around the Flag” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In the afternoon, three white and black Union regiments marched around the graves and staged a drill.

The New York Tribune described the tribute as “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.” The gravesites looked like a “one mass of flowers” and “the breeze wafted the sweet perfumes from them” and “tears of joy” were shed.

This tribute, “gave birth to an American tradition,” Blight wrote in Race and Reunion: “The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration.”

In 1996, Blight stumbled upon a New York Herald Tribune article detailing the tribute in a Harvard University archive — but the origin story it told was not the Memorial Day history that many white people had wanted to tell, he argues.

An Alfred Waud illustration of the.Union soldiers cemetery known as "Martyrs of the Race course" in Charleston, S.C.

Morgan collection of Civil War drawings at the Library of Congress

The origin story that did stick involves an 1868 call from General John A. Logan, president of a Union Army veterans group, urging Americans to decorate the graves of the fallen with flowers on May 30 of that year. The ceremony that took place in Arlington National Cemetery that day has been considered the first official Memorial Day celebration. Memorial Day became a national holiday two decades later, in 1889, and it took a century before it was moved in 1968 to the last Monday of May, where it remains today. According to Blight, Hampton Park, named after Confederate General Wade Hampton, replaced the gravesite at the Martyrs of the Race Course, and the graves were reinterred in the 1880s at a national cemetery in Beaufort, S.C.

The fact that the freed slaves’ Memorial Day tribute is not as well remembered is emblematic of the struggle that would follow, as African Americans’ fight to be fully recognized for their contributions to American society continues to this day.

Write to Olivia B. Waxman at [email protected].

Rep. John Lewis, the longtime Georgia Congressman and icon of the Civil Rights movement, died after a battle with pancreatic cancer, the Associated Press reported late Friday. He was 80.

His death represents the end of an era, not only for Congress but for the country as a whole. A survivor of Alabama’s “Bloody Sunday” massacre in 1965 and a protegé of Martin Luther King Jr. who would ultimately inspire Barack Obama to enter public office, Lewis was one of the last living leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. A member of Congress for more than thirty years, he channeled all he had learned from his fight for equality as a young man into empowering youth and minority communities and encouraging activism. After the election of President Donald Trump he became, in his mid 70s, a self-defined active leader of the resistance movement, boycotting the 2017 inauguration and delivering an impassioned speech on the need to impeach the President last October.

“He was known as one of the most dedicated, principled, courageous Civil Rights activists of all,” Clayborne Carson, a historian and Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, told TIME. “There were a lot of people who I apply those adjectives to, but I think he exemplified them as well or better than anyone else.”

Lewis’ death came months after he was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer in December 2019, which his office said was discovered during a routine medical visit. “I have been in some kind of fight – for freedom, equality, basic human rights – for nearly my entire life,” he said in a statement announcing his diagnosis. “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.” Although he soon began treatments in Washington, he did not shirk his duties, both to Congress and the fight for equality. In March 2020 he returned twice to Selma, Alabama to commemorate the 55th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, where he reiterated the importance of voting—a right for which he had almost been killed fighting for half a century ago. “We must go out and vote like we never, ever voted before,” Lewis told a cheering crowd. “I’m gonna continue to fight. We need your prayers now more than ever before.”

Those sentiments illuminate how, in a sense, Lewis’ life is a microcosm—albeit an extraordinary one—of the evolution and struggles of African Americans in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States. Born in 1940 in Troy, Alabama to the son of sharecroppers, he came of age in the heart of a region where legalized racial inequities deemed him a second-class citizen from birth.

But the treatment he received only imbued him with a sense of determination to change things, an outlook largely shaped by observing the activism of his idol: Martin Luther King Jr. Lewis first met King in 1958 as an eighteen-year-old. Frustrated by his education in segregated schools, he had applied to all-white Troy University but had not heard back. He sought the advice of King in a letter, who promptly booked him a ticket to Montgomery to discuss his plight and whether he should push for admission to Troy University in an attempt to integrate his hometown’s institution. He had been inspired by King’s activism leading the Montgomery bus boycott, which took place less than 60 miles away from Troy, and frequently listened to King’s sermons that were broadcast on the radio for inspiration.

“I had grown up in rural Alabama very, very poor. I saw signs that said White and Colored…And I would ask my mother, my father, my grandparents, “Why? Why is that?” And they’d say, “That’s the way it is. Don’t get in trouble. Don’t get in the way.” But that day, listening to Dr. King, it gave me the sense that things could change,” Lewis wrote in LIFE Martin Luther King Jr.: 50 Years Later, a tribute to King half a century after his 1968 assassination.

Path to Civil Rights

Despite King’s assurances of support if he were to take legal action against the University, Lewis did not move forward because his parents were concerned it would endanger them. Instead, he went to Tennessee for college, graduating from American Baptist Theological Seminary in 1961 and later receiving a bachelor’s from Fisk University in 1967. Both universities were almost entirely African American.

During his time in the seminary Lewis began attending lectures on non-violent protests by James Lawson, a Civil Rights leader who was at the time a graduate student at Vanderbilt University. Inspired by Lawson, he started participating in sit-ins at lunch counters in Nashville, which began shortly after the famed sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. It was during these sit-ins that Lewis was first arrested.

In 1961, Lewis also joined the group of inaugural freedom riders traveling from the East Coast to the South while challenging interstate segregation. He was arrested in Birmingham and beaten at a bus stop in Montgomery, but neither event deterred his future involvement in the movement. Within two years, he had ascended to the leadership of the Civil Rights movement, chairing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which helmed the movement’s student activism. He went on to become the youngest person to speak at the March on Washington in 1963. “How long can we be patient?” a young Lewis told the throng of thousands gathered in the nation’s capitol. “We want our freedom, and we want it now.”

Speaking to TIME in 2013 for the 50th anniversary of the March, Lewis recalled how he was struck by the significance of the moment at the time. “I stood up and I said to myself, ‘This is it,’ ” he recalled. “I looked straight out and I started speaking.”

In March of 1965, in the midst of his tenure chairing the SNCC, Lewis was beaten by law enforcement while on the front lines of the 50-mile march from Selma to Montgomery to push for voting rights, in an infamous episode that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” King had planned to stay in Atlanta because aides feared for his safety, TIME reported in a cover story at the time. So Lewis and Hosea Williams, another civil rights activist, led the hundreds of marchers trying to reach the Edmund Pettus bridge. “We’re not going to jump,” Lewis later remembered telling Williams. “We’re not going back. We’re going to move forward.” And that’s what we did.”

They were quickly greeted by law enforcement officers, some on horseback, others holding clubs, all ordering them to halt. “Turn around and go back to your church!” State Police Major Cloud shouted into a bullhorn. ‘You’ve got two minutes to disperse!”

The marchers stayed put, and the troopers unleashed tear gas and starting beating them. Lewis sustained a fractured skull and was hospitalized. “I thought I was going to die on that bridge. I thought I saw death,” he recalled 50 years after the march, speaking at the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma, which had sheltered him after the violence. “I don’t recall how we got back across that bridge, back to this church…but I refused to die.”

Despite his injuries, Lewis joined King and the other activists who resumed the march two weeks later to Montgomery. The National Guard accompanied them to ensure their safety. Less than five months later, then-President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, banning racial discrimination from voting practices.

Lewis stepped down as SNCC chair in 1966, but he would go on to help legislate the change he championed. As Director of the Voter Education project from 1971 until 1977, he registered four million minorities to voter rolls until then-President Jimmy Carter appointed him Associate Director of the Federal Volunteer Agency ACTION.

Legendary Lawmaker

His advocacy for equal rights ultimately led him to the political arena, where he spent the final chapter of his life. After running unsuccessfully as the Democratic nominee for Georgia’s fifth district in 1977, he was elected to serve on the City Council in Atlanta. In 1986, he prevailed in his quest to serve as Congressman, defeating former State Representative—and fellow civil rights activist—Julian Bond in the runoff for the Democratic primary, and subsequently prevailing in the general election. He held this role until his death.

Known as “the conscience of Congress,” Lewis was respected, if not revered, by members on both sides of the aisle, a rare feat in today’s polarized environment. It was not uncommon for freshmen lawmakers of all stripes to be star-struck as they met Lewis for the first time.

The leadership skills Lewis learned at the height of the Civil Rights Movement lent themselves well to his roles in the Capitol. At the time of his death, he was the senior Chief Deputy Whip for the Democratic Party, and a member of the House Ways & Means Committee. In 2016, in the aftermath of a shooting at an Orlando night club that left 49 dead, he led his colleagues in a 25-hour sit-in to force Republicans, who controlled the chamber at the time, to vote on gun control after lawmakers had been dismissed. “The American people are demanding action,” he said at the time. “Do we have the raw courage to make at least a down payment on ending gun violence in America?”

Lewis’ leadership also displayed itself prominently off the floor. For years, he accompanied politicians from both sides of the aisle to Selma to ensure the power of “Bloody Sunday” would remain in the public’s memory. And when Lewis spoke, his colleagues usually listened — even if his views and choices diverged from their own. In 2008, when Barack Obama’s candidacy was still a long shot, Lewis announced he was switching his endorsement and backing the Illinois Senator over Hillary Clinton. The move was seen as crucial to cementing Obama’s support among African American members of Congress, who would be key to his victory over Clinton.

Lewis reflected on the significance of Obama’s presidency in an interview with TIME before the 2009 inauguration. “When we were organizing voter-registration drives, going on the Freedom Rides, sitting in, coming here to Washington for the first time, getting arrested, going to jail, being beaten, I never thought—I never dreamed—of the possibility that an African American would one day be elected President of the United States,” he said.

In 2010, Obama awarded Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Lewis was married for 44 years to Lillian Miles, who died in 2012. They have one son, John Miles.

Throughout his life and career, Lewis remained steadfast in his dedication to Civil Rights—and wrote eloquently about his worldview in an op-ed for TIME in 2018.

“I heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. say on many occasions, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ I still believe we will get there,” he wrote in a quote he repeated while speaking out after the death of George Floyd. “We will redeem the soul of America, and in doing so we will inspire people around the world to stand up and speak out.”

Started by Charleston residents honoring Black Civil War soldiers, Memorial Day is an American holiday using African customs

Today’s celebration of Memorial Day, recognizes dead soldiers and in particular, those who were in combat when they served. Yet, Memorial Day origins actually trace themselves back to formerly enslaved and free Blacks in Charleston, South Carolina who honored Black Civil War soldiers buried in disgrace.

The current narrative locates Memorial Day in white lives and in particular, those who served and supported the Confederate Army. On the contrary, Memorial Day is very much rooted in African and indigenous rituals of honoring ancestors.

For years, the first Memorial Day was credited as a multi-sited event springing up from the insistence of white wives, sisters and daughters of fallen soldiers in the Confederate and Union armies. The earliest evidence of white participation points to Sue Landon Vaughan who called for a “Decoration Day” on April 25, 1965. During this time, she implored for the barren graves of Civil War soldiers to be consecrated in the white-only, military cemetery in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. As a tribute, she laid pink roses on them.

Yet, weeks before Vaughan’s tribute, dozens of organizers in Charleston had already started to prepare to re-inter 257 bodies of Black soldiers held as prisoners of war in the area. While detained, they were starved and tortured until many died. Eventually, the slain military forces were buried in a mass grave without any recognition.

Five days before Vaughan’s decoration tribute, it was recorded that dozens of volunteers in Charleston reconstructed burial plots according to local Black custom. Bodies would be laid facing the east.  As well, a 10-foot white picket fence was put up along with an iron archway at the entrance announcing, “Martyrs of the Race Course”. The white fence in some West African traditions symbolizes the crossing over, while the iron fence stands for entering into a sacred, protected site.

According to research by Pulitzer Prize winning historian, David Blight, the May 1, 1865 commemoration drew 10,000 participants. The day included a parade with 3,000 children singing Union songs. Additionally, Black pastors and white missionaries officiated a ceremony at the site.

Blight says that so many flowers were placed on the plots of the graves that “the breeze wafted the sweet perfumes from them.” From then on, Memorial Day evolved into a celebration of ancestors for Black Charlestonians.

The role of South Carolina in the Civil War

Civil War battles in South Carolina played a significant role for the Union Army to win. Famed Underground Railroad conductor, Harriet Tubman also served as an officer in the Civil War who led a key victory in the state.

After learning of a Confederate stockpile of ammunition and supplies in South Carolina, Tubman led a regiment of colored troops down the Combahee River on June 2, 1863 and into battle. They burned down most of the large slave plantations, thus freeing 750 people.

While in combat, Tubman also served as a spy, cook and nurse for the Union. Since she was only paid $200, to survive, she set up a small bakery in Charleston selling baked goods and root beer to escaped slaves, soldiers and residents.

Not only did Charleston serve as an important site in the Civil War, it was a booming antebellum city. Full of skilled artisans, crafts persons and those who worked in architecture and construction, Charleston had a burgeoning Black working class. This demographic would be part of the Memorial Day celebration held on May 1, 1965.

Erasing history

So how did this critical fact get lost? Just like much of American history involving contributions from the under-represented, it gets revised.

During this time, the Daughters of the Confederate remapped the memory of the war. Confederate soldiers who were traitors to the United States at the time of the war, were held up as heroes in the South. As white Confederates gained local celebrity, Black contributions and contributors were erased. So much so, local Daughters of Confederate said there was no mass community memorial on May 1, 1865. Rather, a gathering at a cemetery, which became the common thought until Blight produced information from one of the local papers at the time.

Today, Black Charlestonians are still holding ceremonies honoring their dead. In 2019, they held a ceremony for 36 unearthed bodies of enslaved Africans dating back 250 years. Like their forebears who started Memorial Day, they used African traditions and pointed the bodies facing east.

The 16-page illustrated book was first printed in 1957 and encouraged young people, including future Congressman John Lewis, to stage nonviolent protests.

Shortly after noon on August 26, 1961, Hollis Watkins and Curtis Elmer Hayes filled two vacant stools at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in McComb, Mississippi. When the two African American students were refused service at the segregated dining spot, police arrested the pair for failing to “disperse and move on” in violation of Jim Crow laws.

Both men carried copies of a 10-cent comic book that had long been circulating among young civil rights activists. A year earlier, the 16-page comic had inspired Ezell Blair and his roommate, Joseph McNeill to stage boycotts in Greensboro, North Carolina. Days after reading it, they and two other North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College students refused to give up their seats at a Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter, launching the sit-in movement across the South.

The comic book that helped spark a generation of young civil rights protestors did not feature superheroes, but a 42-year-old seamstress and a 26-year-old Baptist pastor. Printed in 1957, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story recounts the 13-month Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began after police arrested civil rights activist Rosa Parks for refusing to yield her bus seat to a white man. The successful protest that ended segregation on Montgomery’s buses propelled the young pastor who led the movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., to national fame.

When Comic Books Were Radical

The idea for the comic book came from Alfred Hassler, publications director for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an interfaith social justice organization that promotes nonviolent activism. The publishing format was an unusual choice not only because the fellowship had no experience publishing comic books, but because comic books were detested by many Americans in the 1950s as a corrupting influence on the morals of America’s youth. 

In 1954, a U.S. Senate subcommittee held televised hearings on the link between comic books and juvenile delinquency, and schools and civic organizations staged bonfire burnings of “lurid” comic books. Even Hassler himself forbade his children from reading them. Still, he saw the medium’s value in reaching a different, younger audience than a conventional book.

The graphic novel was first printed in 1957.

“It was incredibly courageous to make a comic book at that time, but also more possible than ever for an organization like the Fellowship of Reconciliation to work with top-notch illustrators,” says Andrew Aydin, who wrote his master’s thesis on the history and impact of Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story. “The people who worked on it were driven out of the comic book industry by associating and working with some of the companies targeted by the hearings.”

Hassler and Benton Resnik co-wrote the text, while artist Sy Barry, best known for his work on The Phantom comic strip, illustrated the book. King, himself, not only approved of the project, but made small editorial changes to the script. The text detailed the bus boycott and included practical instruction on how activists could employ the nonviolent “Montgomery Method” of protest to bring about social change.

The Fellowship of Reconciliation distributed 250,000 copies of Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story to schools, churches and civil rights groups. Beyond U.S. borders, it eventually inspired anti-apartheid protests in South Africa before the government banned the comic book’s possession. The Fellowship of Reconciliation distributed Spanish-language editions in Latin America, and decades on, Egyptian activist Dalia Ziada worked to have the comic book translated into Arabic and Farsi. After getting approval under Egypt’s rigorous censorship laws, Ziada distributed the comic book in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the 2011 Arab Spring that resulted in the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Inspiration for John Lewis

Rep. John Lewis shows pictures of police attacking himself and other marchers on Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama in 1965.

Among the comic book’s early readers was an 18-year-old student activist named John Lewis. Lewis received a copy while attending a 1958 Nashville workshop to prepare for the freedom rides, lunch counter sit-ins and other nonviolent protests. The civil rights pioneer went on to share the dais in front of the Lincoln Memorial with the hero of that comic book during the 1963 March on Washington, and two years later Lewis and King marched side by side from Selma to Montgomery.

By 2008, Lewis was a Georgia congressman running for re-election and having a conversation with Aydin, his campaign press secretary, and other staff about plans for after Election Day. When Aydin’s mention of plans to attend an upcoming comic book festival elicited chuckles from his colleagues, Lewis said, “Don’t laugh.” He then explained the impact that Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story had on his life.

“I had never heard of that comic,” says Aydin, a digital director and policy adviser on Lewis’s staff. “I read it that night and thought, why is there not a John Lewis comic book? It answered this constant question we had about how to tell the congressman’s story and educate a new generation about his work in the civil rights movement.” Although he repeatedly balked at Aydin’s suggestions that the congressman write a comic book of his own, Lewis eventually agreed—as long as Aydin wrote it with him.

After several years of work, the idea grew into the graphic novel trilogy March, the third book of which earned the National Book Award. The three volumes published between 2013 and 2016 detail the experiences of Lewis growing up in rural Alabama, his first encounter with King and his participation in student sit-ins, protest marches and freedom rides.

Although Lewis, who announced in late 2019 that he was undergoing treatment for stage 4 pancreatic cancer, had written about his life in two prior books, the graphic novel medium connected him to a new audience. The books were, in essence, a sequel to Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story. 

“That comic ends in 1956 and the John Lewis story really picks up in 1958, the year he meets Martin Luther King,” Aydin says. “It’s the next chapter.”

from Stories - HISTORY https://ift.tt/2OCzjBz February 08, 2020 at 12:04AM

Alameda’s Racist Monuments

The East Bay Express recently published a feature series about racist monuments in the East Bay. The article discussed efforts to Rename Barrows Hall at UC Berkeley; critiqued Jack London for white supremacist views; highlighted the hidden racist monuments in Claremont and Rockridge, areas designed to be “whites-only”; and resurrected the connection of the KKK and the Albany Cross. 

The series also mentioned how spaces like Emeryville’s Shellmound glossed over genocide, as former burial grounds for Ohlone people became marketable for development.

Alameda’s own “Mound Street” is named for a shellmound that was removed in the 1800s. Ohlone remains have been found at least twice in the past 10 years on the East End.

Which monuments in Alameda reflect the United States’ racist history?

Alameda recognizes racist white supremacists by maintaining public schools, parks, and streets bearing their names and memories.

ALAMEDA PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Lincoln Middle School 

Abraham Lincoln is known as the U.S. President that “freed the slaves.” While there is debate about Lincoln’s intentions for signing the Emancipation Proclamation–emancipation or winning the Civil War to unite the Union–there is no doubt Lincoln was a white supremacist. During the Douglas-Lincoln debates for Illinois Senate, Lincoln opposes racial equality. Lincoln said: 

“I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races … I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be a position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

The Mound is recognized with a monument at Lincoln Park.

Henry H. Haight Elementary

Henry Haight was the tenth governor of California. After his term as governor, Haight moved to Alameda on West End Ave (now Fourth Street). Haight School is named after him.

In his inaugural address in December 1867, Haight decries post-civil war reconstruction as depriving white people of their rights, and declares Black and Chinese people as inferior.

This is briefly the nature of the reconstruction policy of Congress. It takes from the white people of ten States their constitutional rights, and leaves them subject to military rule; and disfranchises enough white men to give the political control to a mass of negroes just emancipated and almost as ignorant of political duties as the beasts of the field.

He continues in his opposition against suffrage for Negroes, Chinamen, women, and minors. “The aid of Africans and Asiatics would be an evil, not a benefit. It would introduce the antipathy of race into our political contests, and lead to strife and bloodshed.” Extolling the virtues of free (white) labor ideology, he calls on white people of Europe and the eastern U.S. states to emigrate to California, since mixing Black and Asian peoples in the “free state” of Claifornia would be a “contravention of natural laws.” He concludes his point by highlighting the benevolence of white people towards Blacks and Asians in California:

These inferior races have their civil rights, as all good men desire they should have. They can sue and defend in the courts; acquire and possess property; they have entire freedom of person, and can pursue any lawful occupation for a livelihood; but they will never, with the consent of the people of this State, either vote or hold office.

And a school for children is named after him. 

John Muir School 

During World War II, John Muir School was erected in the Estuary Housing Project, a segregated housing project. Muir is known as a father of environmentalism to many, and for his anti-Indian views by many non-white people in the environmental movement. Muir cared more about “Indians, most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence.”

Alameda has other public spaces are named after white men with racist views.

ALAMEDA PARKS

Jackson Park 

Jackson Park is Alameda’s first city park, opened in 1895 as Alameda Park. Originally a private promenade, is one of three named for U.S. presidents, all in the early 1900s.

Jackson was a slaveholder that earned a reputation fighting Native Americans during the Creek and Seminole War. Jackson advocated exterminating these groups. As president, he signed legislation–the “Indian Removal” act–that forced indigenous people from lands of the Mississippi River, so white people could settle and African enslavement could be practiced.

The Hermitage–Jackson’s 1,000 acre plantation–had nine enslaved Africans when he bought the land in 1804. When he died in 1845, he held about 150 people captive. Jackson purchased two Africans when they were children–Aaron and Hannah–and after Jackson’s death, during the Civil War, they escaped to Nashville with their daughter Martha.

Washington Park

George Washington. General. Statesman. Founding Father. And, Racist, White supremacist. Slaveholder.

Washington inherited 10 enslaved Africans when he was just 11 years old. He later gained more when he married a wealthy widow, Martha. He owned about 200 human beings. He benefitted from Black labor, but saw it as causing him “injury” through his own idleness. Although some historians depict Washington as benevolent and against slavery, he never stopped pursuing enslaved Africans like ‘Harry” and Oney Judge that escaped captivity at Mount Vernon. Washington also supported the Fugitive Slave Act, although he also signed the Northwest Ordinance.

Washington Elementary School was renamed Maya Lin in 2012.

Lincoln Park

Notably, Lincoln Park has a small stone marking the shellmound near the Park on Mound Street. Lincoln Park is located on far east side of Alameda, between High Street and Fernside.

Franklin Park 

Benjamin Franklin. Renowned polymath. Scientist, writer, and politician. White supremacist. In addition to his beliefs of Manifest Destiny (icymi: colonialism is racist), he called for excluding the “black”, “tawny”, and “swarthy” from the British Colonies in order to increase the small number of “purely white people in the world.”

And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.

Perhaps it was that partiality that led Franklin to publish advertisements for Runaway Slaves and the sale of enslaved Africans in his publications.

Franklin Park is located in Alameda’s Gold Coast. Known as the wealthiest neighborhood in Alameda, it was the site of the 1966 Estuary projects camp-in, which low-income residents protested their removal from the only housing they could find on the island by protesting in the park near the home of then-Mayor William Godfrey.

Godfrey Park

Milton Godfrey was mayor of Alameda before World War II. In 1943, as shipyard workers migrated to the Bay Area, apparently some concerned in Alameda about Black migration came up. Alameda Mayor Godfrey said keeping “Negroes” seeking to migrate to the island contained would "receive the unceasing vigilance" of government. 

Godfrey Park is located on Bay Farm Island, old Bay Farm, next to the Golf Course, off Beach Rd. 

Note: Alameda’s Tillman Park is not named after Benjamin Tillman, the violent South Carolina governor and white supremacist.

ALAMEDA STREETS

Clay Street 

Henry Clay was a Congressman, three-time Speaker of the House and Senator representing the slave-state of Kentucky. His father was a slaveowner, holding two dozen people in captivity. His brother Cassius Clay became a leading emancipationist. Clay, a federalist (states’ rights) leader and later Secretary of State, Clay was an early supporter of the American Colonisation Society, an organization that sought to expel free colored people from the United States and send them to West Africa. Liberia was part of their early efforts. Clay saw enslaved Africans as “ignorant, uneducated, and incapable of appreciating the value, or enjoying the privileges of freedom.” In his 1827 speech before the American Colonization Society, Clay argued that if free and enslaved Africans were exported, the potential threat to the European race would be dismissed. “The African Colonists, whom we send to convert the heathen, are of the same colour, the same family, the same physical constitution.” Clay also sponsored the 1850 Compromise bill.

Calhoun Street

John C. Calhoun was a staunch defender of the enslavement of Africans, a “positive good:”

But let me not be understood as admitting, even by implication, that the existing relations between the two races in the slaveholding States is an evil:—far otherwise; I hold it to be a good, as it has thus far proved itself to be to both, and will continue to prove so if not disturbed by the fell spirit of abolition. I appeal to facts. Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually.

Fillmore Street 

Millard Fillmore was 13th president of the U.S.. He called slavery evil, yet signed and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act.

Madison Street 

James Madison was a slave owning president.

Van Buren Street

Martin Van Buren was a slave owner growing up. While President, he apparently supported forcing the Africans enslaved on the ship Amistad to be returned to Spanish Cuba, where they would be re-enslaved.

Garfield Street

James Garfield is known for supporting the abolition of slavery, but also held anti-Black sentiment. He once confided privately that he held “a strong feeling of repugnance when I think of the negro (sic) being made our political equal and I would be glad if they could be colonized, sent to heaven, or got rid of in any decent way…”

Jefferson Street and Monroe Street were renamed in the 1900s to San Jose Ave. Currently, Washington and Jackson also have streets named after them in this area. 

The West End has a few questionable street names. 

Jack London Ave

The Bayport Homes contains Jack London Ave. London’s wet nurse, Jennie Prentiss lived in Alameda on Pacific Ave in the 1880s. London called himself her “white pickaninny.”

Webster Street 

Which Webster is Oakland and Alameda’s Webster Street named after: Daniel or Noah? Daniel Webster supported the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act. Noah Webster, of Webster’s dictionary fame, and Congressman, notably opposed slavery. However, he once said abolitionists belong in the penitentiary and viewed slavery as the sin of the South, not New England. He also had disparaging remarks about Native Americans.

Taylor Street 

Zachary Taylor was a Southerner and held slaves captive. He gained prominence for his role in the Black Hawk War, the conflict that led to the Indian Removal policy.

Haight Ave also runs from Pacific east to Ninth Street. (See above)

Lincoln Ave – Once called Railroad Ave, Lincoln is one of Alameda’s major “east-west” thoroughfares on the island. (See above)

Are there others?

Updated: This post was updated 10/23/2017 to include Godfrey Park.

How one man’s DNA results influenced his work as a culinary historian and a food writer.

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What do food items and relatives heritage have in typical? Perfectly, for Michael Twitty, a good deal.

What did you have for meal very last evening?

Do you feel your fantastic-grandmother — or fantastic-fantastic-grandmother — ate the similar issue for meal? Chances are, you probably haven't given a great deal assumed to why your food is what it is — or irrespective of whether your fantastic-grandparents ever ate the similar issue.

All pictures via Michael Twitty, employed with authorization.

But ever since he was a baby, culinary historian Michael Twitty has assumed about these types of inquiries. So when Twitty grew to become curious about his have ancestral roots, food items was normally heading to be a portion of his investigation journey.

When he combined these two passions — culinary historical past and genealogy — it led him on an outstanding journey discovering the food items and historical past of the outdated South, one that would change how he saw his family's purpose in historical past and society forever.

Twitty decided to embark on a journey to find out the real truth about his heritage by taking an AncestryDNA examination.

"For African-Individuals, the want to know what makes up your conglomerate blackness is deep," Twitty says."It can be in every one of us, and we acquire that journey quite significantly. We want to know who we are and in which we appear from ... because of slavery."

Not only did he want to know in which his relatives arrived from but also irrespective of whether some of the stories passed down in his relatives were correct — which includes the stories about his white ancestors, the folks who experienced as soon as held his relatives in bondage.

"We experienced an outstanding oral historical past that explained a good deal of items about who we were," he says, "and really frankly, we could not normally verify those items."

For illustration, he experienced been advised that his ancestor was a captain, and his relatives considered they understood his title and the story of how his fantastic-fantastic-fantastic-grandmother was born, but there was no way to verify it, no delivery certificate to title him as the father, because she was born a slave.

Twitty not only preferred answers, he preferred to comprehend what it was like to stay his ancestors' lifestyle. So, he embarked on a journey from Maryland to Texas and again once more.

Through that time, he immersed himself in outdated documents, expenditures of sale, and other historical files on Ancestry.com.

He also frequented restored plantations, farms, and battlefields.

He fulfilled with a 101-year-outdated man who experienced lived by the Jim Crow many years, he spoke with Civil War re-enactors, and he put in a good deal of time having and cooking together with black, white, Native American, Latino, and Asian cooks to comprehend their purpose in the shaping of southern historical past and society.

To better comprehend his ancestor’s knowledge, he picked cotton for 16 several hours, primed tobacco, plucked Carolina rice, slash sugar cane, and sucked on red clay.

He also took an AncestryDNA examination to get to his genetic roots.

The results revealed that his origins were sixty nine% African and 28% European. His ancestors experienced appear from these types of destinations as Ghana, Senegal, Congo, and Nigeria though his European ancestors were largely from Scandinavia and the Iberian peninsula.

Michael Twitty's AncestryDNA results.

He encouraged some others in his relatives to acquire the assessments way too — which includes his grandfather, an uncle, and his cousins — and because his AncestryDNA results allowed him to examine his DNA against a big population of some others who experienced also taken the examination, he was capable to slowly but surely piece alongside one another a a great deal clearer photograph of who his relatives was, in which they arrived from, and how they moved all around the United States.  

In point, with the aid of his AncestryDNA results and documents from Ancestry.com, he was capable to identify and title at minimum a dozen new ancestors, black and white, heading again two generations — aiding him verify that a good deal of those outdated relatives stories were, in point, correct.

"When you can in fact acquire your genealogy — your genetic genealogy — and see that indeed, without a doubt, you are a portion of these historical practices, migrations, journeys. When historical past is a narrative … all of the unexpected, you happen to be serious," Twitty says. "You are serious in a way that a ebook can not convey to you that you happen to be serious."

This journey also confirmed him how a great deal his family's story overlapped with the historical past of present day "southern cuisine."

The compelled migration of domestic slaves transformed food items in the area because cooks brought their tastes for certain food items with them. And his relatives was a portion of that story.

For illustration, he says, "soul food items was a cuisine, a memory cuisine brought by folks who were migrating to other areas of the state from the South, but it was dependent on that survival cuisine that we created in the outdated South that stored us heading for generations."

Twitty's quest to find out far more about himself and his roots experienced a remarkable influence on his function as a culinary historian and food items writer.

It altered how he saw the purpose of food items the two in his relatives and in the outdated South as a complete — and it altered how he felt about historical past. Realizing who his ancestors were, looking at the documents of their life, understanding in which they were from, and getting the purpose that they played in the historical past of food items and the South, brought that historical past alive for him in a way nothing at all else could.

This led him to write a ebook known as "The Cooking Gene," which will be posted this August.

"I preferred to acquire our complete state on a journey, and I preferred to use that information and facts from the ancestry examination to backup my statements," Twitty says.

"This is in which soul food items will come from in Africa — seem at my genes. My genes clearly show that indeed, it did appear from Nigeria and Senegal and Congo and Ghana and other destinations. That story is in our blood — it can be in our bones."

Twitty thinks some others could come across them selves creatively impressed by their results way too. "Your AncestryDNA results can be a new way into what ever your imaginative passion [is]," he says."A memoir or cookbook is just one outlet, it could be a quilt, a yard, a social media group, a novel, you could journey ... your results are an infinite invitation."

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Day 4 BLUESFEST 2015

Bluesfest 2015 Day 4

Bluesfest 2015

If Saturday night at Bluesfest 2015 was the night of one word descriptions, Day Four goes down in history by being the day of four words – Oh My F*%king Goddess!!!

Where else in Australia can you see the following live acts all at the same festival, all on the same night?

Here’s a quick roll call;

Diesel, Watussi, Nikki Hill, Blue King Brown, Rodrigo y Gabriela, Angelique Kidjo, Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals and Mavis Staples.

Truly!!!

We woke up the afternoon of Day 4 a little later than expected as Nanna Naps sometimes fool you when you don’t set the alarm. This set the scene for the rest of the evening as it was more a matter of just going with the flow (and really, what else does one do at Bluesfest?). With this in mind, the night laid out an eclectic and mesmerizing smorgasboard of musical taste sensations to once again graze on and that nourished and sustained the very core of us all. If only there were seconds available. Yum!!!

So here goes Day 4 in no particular order.

By chance, I had to head back to the car to grab some jackets and on the way out heard this amazing vocalist as I walked passed The Delta Stage. I kept on going to the carpark, and when I returned and stopped for a moment , I realized it was Diesel, up there on the stage all by his gorgeous self. Everyone’s favourite American-born, Australian music legend did it all one man band style last night, with just his guitar/s, harmonica, drum machine and of course that honey coated husky voice of his. Swoon…

After bursting onto the Australian live scene in 1986 as ‘Johnny Diesel & The Injectors’ and a subsequent solo career from 1991, Diesel (Mark Lizotte) still continues to bring it everytime, and the crowd was loving the trip down memory lane. I caught Johnny Diesel and The Injectors at The Arts Factory/Piggery, Byron Bay back in my early highschool days, so I, along with everyone else at The Delta Stage, was reliving times past when he broke out “Soul Revival”. With a career spanning more than 25 years, over 35 singles, 13 albums, 6 ARIA awards and record sales edging 1 million, Diesel is a journeyman of music. With blues music in his DNA, Diesel has blended styles to come up with a unique sound, punctuated with his distinct guitar playing and soulful vocals. Amongst all the spectacular international acts on hand at this years Bluesfest, it was also refreshing to be able to catch one of the last true pub circuit live Aussie acts. Wow!!!

Nikki Hill hit The Delta Stage just as I was chowing on down into a big juicy chicken burger next door at the Burger Yard. Often coined the new queen of soul, Nikki hails from North Carolina, and was influenced mostly by Little Richard. Nikki comes by her Deep South soul honestly. This blues shouter and growler is a bona-fide rock’n’roll diva that has audiences wrapped around her finger. As I was grooving in the Burger Yard, I thought to myself, imagine if Bluesfest secured Tina Turner one year. It must have been the burger, mixed with Nikki’s rock chick sweet soul style that made me wonder. We listened to Nikki’s cd on the way to Bluesfest on day 4 so it was great to be able to catch her live.

I fully love me some Watussi, the more live the more better too. I met these guys somewhere back in 2005 at Koori Radio 93.7fm Marrickville when they were just starting out on their musical journey, so I have a special spot for them on my insides! These Sydney based Afro-Latin-rockers, led by Colombian born compadre Oscar Jimenez, with their unmistakable distorted riffs and funked-up percussive rhythms brought to Bluesfest 2015 a dance extravaganza with new exotic South American rhythms to celebrate the band’s 10 year anniversary. The last few years have seen the group support performances with acts such as Santana, Earth Wind & Fire, Seun Kuti, Manu Chao. These brothers need to be booked for Mardi Gras and have their own float!!!

Mavis Staples shared on stage, "We must all work towards peace, because without peace and equality society cannot move on and become better,". This really set the scene for her live set. It made me think about all the acts at Bluesfest, and that while many of the younger generation of groups sprout peace, unity, freedom etc, profusely, sometimes even stopping their set to explain the virtues of the struggle, other acts such as the legendary Mavis Staples was there in the frontline and embeds her music with the very essence of what the youth Bluesfest acts very rarely encounter. Grammy Award winner MAVIS STAPLES was voted as one of the 100 Greatest Women of Rock and Roll, and Rolling Stone listed her as one of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. MAVIS STAPLES is the real deal. In her 67-year career – from her ground-breaking family gospel group – THE STAPLES SINGERS ‘I'll Take You There’, ‘Respect Yourself’, ‘If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me)’ and on her own, MAVIS STAPLES is responsible for blazing a Rhythm & Blues trail, while never relinquishing her Gospel roots and it is now that her star is shining brightest. Mavis Staples has publicly stated that Bluesfest is her favourite festival of all time. The crowd went wild (in a very self respectful way) when this inspirational 75 year old Aunty belted out the her song ‘Respect Yourself’. The lady don’t lie!!

It would not be a real Bluesfest experience without the next act, BKB, another band with a strong social message who started their career jamming in the streets of Byron Bay over a decade ago. Lead singer Natalie Pa'apa'a offered a clear message for her audience.

"Our music is dedicated to the Aboriginal people of this country and of all nations, because they know what is like to be alienated by a system that does not work for us, that needs to be changed," she said.

The message '‪#‎sosblackaustralia' was projected into the stage's background during their show a number of times, referring to the campaign against the possible closing of remote Aboriginal communities in Western Australia.

"Australia is the only country in the world that did not sign a treaty with its Aboriginal people after colonization," said Pa'apa'a.

BKB also invited Yirrmal Marika up onstage to perform Yothu Yindi’s Djapana and Treaty, which made the crowd go absolutely wild. For a local (my Grandfather was born at Tyagarah, where Bluesfest is held), Aboriginal South Sea Islander like myself, it always blows my mind when Aboriginal culture is embraced by the masses with such Respect and Love. Awesome!!!

I have been blessed to see ANGÉLIQUE KIDJO, Grammy Award winner, tireless campaigner for women’s health and education in Africa, a UNICEF Peace Ambassador and also, with a 20 year discography, 12 albums and thousands of concerts around the world, a gifted performer and prolific songwriter, many many times (in South Africa, Sydney, Melbourne and at Bluesfest 2 or 3 times). This woman never fails to impress me live, and as always gets the mob up and dancing. Her no nonsense style of interacting with the punters whilst on stage is very old school, and her pride as an African woman is undeniable. Last night at The Crossroads Stage, Anjelique had the tent packed and up dancing all the way through her act. Even the lantern paraders couldn’t help but come in and proceed up and down the aisles. Such is the magnetism of this amazing woman.

Rodrigo y Gabriela, the internationally acclaimed Mexican acoustic rock guitar duo who have won the hearts of many Australians music fans (including all of us at Bluesfest) are returning with their unique instrumental blend of Rumba Flamenca including elements of Rock, Metal, Jazz and World music. Rodrigo y Gabriela will also be bringing their latest release and first studio album in five years with them; 9 Dead Alive.

Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero have been playing together for more than fifteen years. First as young Thrash Metal fans in their native Mexico City, then as innocents abroad and street musicians in Dublin, Ireland at the turn of the millennium, and finally as the globe-straddling, film-scoring, record-breaking artists they are today including career sales in excess of 1.5 million albums, and sold out tours worldwide including headlining at London's Wembley Arena, just two weeks before they played Bluesfest 2015.

Rodrigo y Gabriela are known for their exhilarating live shows, the extraordinary interplay between Sanchez’s fiery lead lines and Quintero’s phenomenal rhythmic battery, creates a sound which is truly universal. It was liberating to be able to experience music without lyrics, and it was so cool to see the capacity filled Mojo Stage audience getting right behind this dynamic duo. Their appeal is boundless, their scope limitless, and the music timeless, we were all wowed by Rodrigo y Gabriela at Bluesfest. Footstomping galore was going down at this pefomance, in and out of the mud. Big Fun Indeed!!!

The much anticipated reunion of BEN HARPER & THE INNOCENT CRIMINALS at Bluesfest on Easter Sunday (April 5) went down into history as one of the major events on the 2015 Festival calendar. It was the bands ONLY performance in Australia. When brother Ben hit the stage, there were still people coming into the greater Mojo compound. An artist such as Ben Harper and his music needs to be heard as far and as wide as possible.

Another amazeballs evening of great music, vibes and company.

After a beautiful night under The Moon and experiencing great live music, beautiful hearted people and awesome food, as I walking out of the festival site proper I turned and said to my mate, “wouldn’t it be good if the world was like this all the time”, then quickly shifted focus and added, “in fact I take that back, ‘cos if the world was like this all the time, we wouldn’t appreciate it’.

Oh, and did I mention that Stunning Moon...

ONE LOVE

Memorial Day, which is an annual holiday in the U.S. held on the last Monday of May, honors all those who died serving in the U.S. military. It also marks the unofficial start of summer and comes with a three-day holiday weekend where people spend extra time with family and friends by sharing a meal or planning backyard barbecues or picnics.

The day also comes with military ceremonies and gravesite visits and what is widely known is that the first national Memorial Day observance happened in D.C.’s backyard, at Arlington National Cemetery on May 30, 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War. How formerly enslaved Black Americans started the real first Memorial Day in 1865 is known by only a few as the event was for many years suppressed history.

Just about a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, newly emancipated Black people there exhumed a mass grave for Union soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice for freedom.

During the Civil War, the Confederate army held Union soldiers as captives in Charleston’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, a country club that the Confederate army transformed into a makeshift prison. According to History.com, over 260 Union soldiers died due to poor conditions at the prison which led to diseases. Those who died were buried in a mass grave behind the grandstands.

When the Union army seized Charleston, emancipated men and women honored the fallen soldiers by giving them a proper burial. They exhumed the mass grave of the Union soldiers in April 1865 and reinterred the bodies in a new cemetery they built with a tall white-washed fence. They wrote on the fence the words “Martyrs of the Race Course.” It took them two weeks to reinter the body of each soldier.

On May 1, 1865, about a month after the Civil War formally ended, Charleston held what is now believed to be the first Memorial Day commemoration on record. According to History.com, “a crowd of 10,000 people, mostly freed slaves with some white missionaries, staged a parade around the race track. Three thousand Black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and sang ‘John Brown’s Body.’ Members of the famed 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments were in attendance and performed double-time marches. Black ministers recited verses from the Bible.”

Interestingly, Charleston is where the event marking the beginning of the Civil War began. It is now recognized as where some Charlestonians first celebrated the Union troops via the 1865 event.

“It’s the fact that this occurred in Charleston at a cemetery site for the Union dead in a city where the Civil war had begun and that it was organized and done by African American former slaves is what gives it such poignancy,” Yale History and African American studies professor Dr. David W. Blight said of the 1865 event.

Blight discovered the untold story of the first Memorial Day while going through archival materials from Union soldiers in a Harvard University library in 1996.

“This was a story that had really been suppressed both in the local memory and certainly the national memory,” said Blight. “But nobody who had witnessed it could ever have forgotten it.”

“Our history is full of wonderful moments, it’s also full of dark moments,” Dr. Adam Domby, a Civil War historian told WJLA. “Southern history is not just the history of the Confederacy. It’s also the history of before and after.”

After the war, the old horse track and country club were torn down. A rich Northern patron helped move the graves of the Union soldiers from the white-fenced graveyard in Charleston to the Beaufort National Cemetery.