Memorial Day

Memorial [məˈmôēəl] — Merriam-Webster defines it as serving to preserve remembrance.

I come from a long line of military service members. Dad, grandfather, brother, uncles, cousins. Through ancestry records, I found a great uncle who served in WWI, reenlisted, and then served again in WWII. Service to this country has been a long and unbroken tradition in my family, and that is not lost on me.

What is also not lost on me is the disservice this country has bestowed upon Black military members and the long, documented history of segregation and racism built into the military industrial complex. The men in my family put on a uniform for a nation that would not always let them sit at its table. They bled for freedoms they were denied. They died on foreign soil defending a democracy that, at home, treated them as less than full citizens. That contradiction has never been fully reconciled. It has only been repackaged.

Looking at this photograph, I am reminded that valor has never been the question. The question has always been whether this country would honor the valor of those who did not look the part of the America, it imagined itself to be. My grandfather answered the call. So did millions of other Black men and women who served not because the country was perfect, but because they believed or perhaps insisted that it could be.

The recent denigration and destruction of our political systems as we have known them to be, one thing remains constant: the continual thread of racist policy and political gamesmanship designed to disenfranchise Black, brown, and other communities across this nation. We the People is again being narrowed to a very small sub-sect of the people continuing to exclude those who don’t look the same, pray the same, or maintain the same tax bracket. You fill in the blank.

My recent trip down South may have unsettled something in me about what memorial remembrance actually means in this moment. As many times as I have traveled through the depths of Confederate territory, this time felt different. This time, the stench of hypocrisy was inescapable. We were there to celebrate a milestone accomplishment of one of our young joy and pride thick in the air. But across town, “All Roads Lead South,” a National Day of Action for Voting Rights, was underway. The rights of AMERICAN people are under attack again!

The collision of those two realities stayed with me.

Voting rights are under attack in this country not rhetorically, but legislatively, systematically, and with the kind of quiet deliberateness that history has taught us to recognize. What makes this particular assault so insidious is the costume it wears. It wraps itself in scripture and salvation, in crosses and constitutions, in the language of God and country while engineering laws designed to make it harder for Black and Brown people to cast a ballot. This is not a new playbook. White Christian nationalism has long used the church as cover for the courthouse, sanctifying disenfranchisement with the same breath it claims divine authority. The Sunday sermon preaches love thy neighbor, while Monday morning the legislature draws maps that erase him. The cross and the ballot box have been in conflict in this country since Reconstruction. What is happening now is not new. It is just louder, and less ashamed of itself.

Members of my family marched at Selma. They boycotted in Montgomery. They put their bodies on the line so that the promise of the 15th Amendment might finally mean something in practice, not just on paper. That was sixty years ago, and yet, here we are.

The thread that runs through all of this through my grandfather’s uniform, through the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, through the rally happening across town while we celebrated is the same thread. It is the story of Black Americans who have never stopped giving to a country that has never stopped making them fight for the right to belong to it.

Memorial Day asks us to remember, but remembrance without reckoning is just nostalgia. Yes, we must remember the soldiers who fought on the battle lines to liberate the jailed and oppressed. But we should also remember the soldiers we fought on a different front line. The frontline that demanded equal rights and opportunity. The frontline that demanded that We The People, included all the people, not just a select few. The frontline that questioned the morality of hypocrisy. The men and women who fought for racial equality for all. This memorial day is to truly honor those who served. Those who served in uniform while being treated as second-class citizens we must be willing to name what was done to them, and to the and to those everyday civilians who fought wars at home to establish freedom for all citizens.

The sacrifice was real. The promise must be too.

To remember is not enough. We must also protect.