Happy Memorial Decoration Day

I have posted this before but I do think it bears repeating.

This is the story of the first Decoration Day, which would become Memorial Day, that occurred down here in South Carolina, where good, sweet, wonderful things do happen.

Enjoy, and Happy Memorial Decoration Day.

"The First Decoration Day"

by David W. Blight, Yale University

Americans understand that Memorial Day, or "Decoration Day," as my parents called it, has something to do with honoring the nation's war dead. It is also a day devoted to picnics, road races, commencements, and double-headers. But where did it begin, who created it, and why?

As a nation we are at war now, but for most Americans the scale of death and suffering in this seemingly endless wartime belongs to other people far away, or to people in other neighborhoods. Collectively, we are not even allowed to see our war dead today. That was not the case in 1865.

At the end of the Civil War the dead were everywhere, some in half buried coffins and some visible only as unidentified bones strewn on the killing fields of Virginia or Georgia. Americans, north and south, faced an enormous spiritual and logistical challenge of memorialization. The dead were visible by their massive absence. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died in the war. American deaths in all other wars combined through the Korean conflict totaled 606,000. If the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, 4 million names would be on the Vietnam Memorial. The most immediate legacy of the Civil War was its slaughter and how remember it.

War kills people and destroys human creation; but as though mocking war's devastation, flowers inevitably bloom through its ruins. After a long siege, a prolonged bombardment for months from all around the harbor, and numerous fires, the beautiful port city of Charleston, South Carolina, where the war had begun in April, 1861, lay in ruin by the spring of 1865. The city was largely abandoned by white residents by late February. Among the first troops to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the Twenty First U. S. Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the formal surrender of the city.

Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters' horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, "Martyrs of the Race Course."

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders' race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy's horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing "a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before."

At 9 am on May 1, the procession stepped off led by three thousand black schoolchildren carrying arm loads of roses and singing "John Brown's Body." The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathering in the cemetery enclosure; a childrens' choir sang "We'll Rally around the Flag," the "Star-Spangled Banner," and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture. No record survives of which biblical passages rung out in the warm spring air, but the spirit of Leviticus 25 was surely present at those burial rites: "for it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you… in the year of this jubilee he shall return every man unto his own possession."

Following the solemn dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: they enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches, and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantry participating was the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th U.S. Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite. The war was over, and Decoration Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been all about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders' republic, and not about state rights, defense of home, nor merely soldiers' valor and sacrifice.

According to a reminiscence written long after the fact, "several slight disturbances" occurred during the ceremonies on this first Decoration Day, as well as "much harsh talk about the event locally afterward." But a measure of how white Charlestonians suppressed from memory this founding in favor of their own creation of the practice later came fifty-one years afterward, when the president of the Ladies Memorial Association of Charleston received an inquiry about the May 1, 1865 parade. A United Daughters of the Confederacy official from New Orleans wanted to know if it was true that blacks had engaged in such a burial rite. Mrs. S. C. Beckwith responded tersely: "I regret that I was unable to gather any official information in answer to this." In the struggle over memory and meaning in any society, some stories just get lost while others attain mainstream dominance.

Officially, as a national holiday, Memorial Day emerged in 1868 when General John A. Logan, commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans organization, called on all former northern soldiers and their communities to conduct ceremonies and decorate graves of their dead comrades. On May 30, 1868, when flowers were plentiful, funereal ceremonies were attended by thousands of people in 183 cemeteries in twenty-seven states. The following year, some 336 cities and towns in thirty-one states, including the South, arranged parades and orations. The observance grew manifold with time. In the South Confederate Memorial Day took shape on three different dates: on April 26 in many deep South states, the anniversary of General Joseph Johnston's final surrender to General William T. Sherman; on May 10 in South and North Carolina, the birthday of Stonewall Jackson; and on June 3 in Virginia, the birthday of Jefferson Davis.

Over time several American towns, north and south, claimed to be the birthplace of Memorial Day. But all of them commemorate cemetery decoration events from 1866. Pride of place as the first large scale ritual of Decoration Day, therefore, goes to African Americans in Charleston. By their labor, their words, their songs, and their solemn parade of flowers and marching feet on their former owners' race course, they created for themselves, and for us, the Independence Day of the Second American Revolution.

The old race track is still there — an oval roadway in Hampton Park in Charleston, named for Wade Hampton, former Confederate general and the white supremacist Redeemer governor of South Carolina after the end of Reconstruction. The lovely park sits adjacent to the Citadel, the military academy of South Carolina, and cadets can be seen jogging on the old track any day of the week. The old gravesite dedicated to the "Martyrs of the Race Course" is gone; those Union dead were reinterred in the 1880s to a national cemetery in Beaufort, South Carolina. Some stories endure, some disappear, some are rediscovered in dusty archives, the pages of old newspapers, and in oral history. All such stories as the First Decoration Day are but prelude to future reckonings. All memory is prelude.

David W. Blight teaches American History at Yale University where he is the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, the author of the Bancroft prize-winning Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the forthcoming A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation.

Ain't That America II ...

Well, what a week or so it's been in America; Pam Bondi is bought and paid for; DOGE is corrupt; the CDC has given up on the Norovirus, too; books are being banned; Black history, AKA American History, is being erased; The Felon proves again that he's an angry little racist; Leon bought the presidency and made billions for himself; The Felon denied FEMA aid to hurricane victims; Linda McMahon proved you can be an uneducated tool and still run the Department of Education ...

And then Warren Buffet has an idea, and it will take We The People to get it done ...

In 2013, Florida AG Pam Bondi announced a fraud investigation into The Felon University. A few days later, The Felon Foundation gave $25,000 to a Bondi re-election group. Bondi then announced she would not investigate The Felon University. It is illegal for tax-exempt charities to engage in political activity and The Felon paid a $2,500 fine. A Bondi advisor said Bondi had solicited the contribution. If done as a quid pro quo that would be illegal.

The Felon and his daughter-wife Ivanka Felon then donated $500 each to Bondi’s campaign. In 2014, The Felon and his daughter-wife Ivanka Felon donated $125K to the Florida GOP, which helped with Bondi’s campaign. The Felon rented out Mar-Illegal to Bondi at a $135K discount for a fundraiser where he was a “special guest.”

Bondi spoke at the Republican National Convention in support of The Felon and now she works as his personal AG.

An unsigned agreement between DOGE and the Department of Labor provides significant insight into the working protocols between DOGE and federal agencies. Notably, the agreement calls for the Department of Labor to reimburse the DOGE up to $1.3 million for work done by four DOGE affiliates.

The agreement is backdated to start on January 20, the day The Felon was inaugurated, and ends on July 4, 2026—a timeline consistent with the executive order that created DOGE.

Paying DOGE an estimated $1.3 million for the services of four employees over that timespan would establish an annualized pay of about $217,000 … more than $20K above the pay scale for career civil servants. Musk has repeatedly claimed that DOGE workers would not be paid.

The fraud is coming from inside DOGE.

All of the full-time employees in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vessel Sanitation Program are now off the job, gutting the agency’s ability to investigate outbreaks and conduct health inspections on cruise ships. The cuts to the program’s inspectors baffled CDC officials since the staff is not paid for by taxpayer dollars but through fees from cruise ships companies.

All this, as the U.S. has been battling a record surge of norovirus, largely driven by a new strain of the virus.

A Florida law that has pushed public schools to remove thousands of books, including literary classics, from their shelves could get even more restrictive as Republican lawmakers move to close a “loophole” they say still allows volumes depicting nudity or sexual conduct to remain on campuses.

New bills backed by GOP legislators would mean school districts could no longer consider a book’s artistic, literary, political or scientific value when deciding whether to keep it. Instead, any book that “describes sexual conduct” could face removal … books like “No David!” by David Shannon, showing cartoonish bare bottoms out of fear they depict the prohibited “sexual conduct” and classics such as Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” also have been pulled.

The asshat behind the bill, wingnut Clay Yarborough says if he took photos of some pages in the targeted books, he would “go to federal prison” for child porn.

Seriously.

An image of and quote from Harriet Tubman have been removed from a National Parks webpage about the “Underground Railroad,” following several prominent changes to government websites under the racist regime; also gone are references to “enslaved” people and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

The webpage now leads with commemorative stamps of various civil rights leaders with text including the phrase “Black/White Cooperation.”

Whereas previously, the article started with a description of enslaved peoples’ efforts to free themselves and the organization of the Underground Railroad after the Fugitive Slave Act, the article now starts with two paragraphs that emphasize the “American ideals of liberty and freedom” and do not specifically mention slavery.

It starts with erasing history …

A portrait of The Felon that depicts him raising his fist after that publicity stunt staged attempt on his ear is replacing an image of former President Obama in a prominent spot inside the White House.

Someone’s tiny orange mushroom dick is twisted …

PS Why would anyone hang a picture in their house of the moment after a gunman tried to kill them unless ... oh yeah, staged shooting.

Leon Skum bought the presidency for The Felon for an estimated $300M but what did he get for his money other than a room at Mar-Illegal and rides on Air Force One?

Well, SpaceX—best known for its exploding rockets—landed a $5.92 BILLION contract with the Pentagon for Space Force rocket launches—the largest contract among the three firms who secured deals to send satellites into space.

While Leon Skum and DOGE cut essential services to We The People he gets a taxpayer funded windfall.

After helping to elect The Felon to the presidency in 2024, and after the devastating damage from Hurricane Helene, this week The Felon denied North Carolina’s request for more FEMA relief calling it “unwarranted.”

But his golf weekends are fully taxpayer funded …

This week, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO who is now charged with making decisions for 100 million American school children, repeatedly referred to AI technology as “A1.”

Yes, the steak sauce.

“Kids are sponges. They just absorb everything. It wasn’t all that long ago that it was, ‘We’re going to have internet in our schools!’ Now let’s see A1 and how that can be helpful.”

For McMahon it proved how inept and incompetent and in desperate need to be reschooled she is, but for Kraft Heinz’s A.1. steak sauce, it was free product placement and the brand jumped on Instagram with a spoofed ad for a McMahon-inspired A.1. bottle:

“For educational purposes only.”

And the post was captioned:

“You heard her. Every school should have access to A.1.”

The Felon only hires the “best” people …

Warren Buffett has a simple fix to end the deficit and it’s good:

"You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election. Fair is fair. How does this sound?

1. No Tenure/No Pension. A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

2. Congress—past, present & future—participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 12/31/2025. The American people did not make this contract with Congress. Congress made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their terms, then go home and back to work.

The 26th amendment—granting the right to vote for 18-year-olds—took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple. The people demanded it. That was in 1971 before computers, email, cell phones, etc. Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, 7 took a year or less to become the law of the land...all because of public pressure.”

Sounds good to me …

The Funny Papers

Max Espinoza, Muzej Karikature, Adam Zyglis, Clay Bennett, Rick McKee, Nick Anderson, Dennis Goris, Jack Ohman, Kirk Anderson, Michael de Adder, Jesse Duquette, Gary Huck, Mark Dolk

Bobservations

They say opposites attract and you don’t get much more opposite than Carlos and me.

Case in point: this morning I woke up at 5:45AM and used the bathroom. I got back in bed and realized I was awake and not going back to sleep so I fed the cats, turned the heat on and paid some bills.

Carlos, on the other hand, awoke at 6:50AM to use the bathroom and then came into the office and asked why I was up. I told him why and then he said, “Well, I’m going back to bed until the alarm goes off.”

That was at 6:56AM and the alarm goes off at 7 AM.

Opposites.

This week’s Tuxedo memory is from April 2014 and is creatively entitled:

“Photo of the Week

Yeah yeah yeah. it's another picture of Tuxedo--the most handsome cat ever -- but if I wanna dub it 'Photo of the Week' then I'll do it!”

And I did, and do, and will ….

Floridian ... which explains everything ... Cynthia Kelly is suing Hershey because she claims its holiday-themed Reese’s peanut butter candies lack the artistic details shown on the packaging that made them worth buying.

Kelly says she would not have paid $4.49 for a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkins had she known that the candies not only lacked the “cute looking” carved eyes and mouth shown on the packaging, but any carvings at all and so she wants $5 million.

Only in America, I think.

It has been brought to my attention that the stick figure decals on the back windows of many cars are NOT pedestrian "kill" scores but are meant to represent members of your family.

I will be removing mine ASAP to avoid any further confusion.

$19,660,000,000. That's the profit Exxon just posted for third quarter of 2023, the highest in their 152-year history so it’s not inflation, y’all, it’s corporate greed.

Eat the rich.

I have just added three new titles to my book list and cannot wait to start them …

Pageboy is actor Elliott Page’s “brutally honest” coming-of-age memoir.  Elliot shares his story with never-before-heard details and intimate interrogations on gender, love, mental health, relationships, and Hollywood.

In Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America Michael Harriot presents a more accurate version of American history that  removes the white sugarcoating from the American story, placing Black people squarely at the center. For too long, we have refused to acknowledge that American history taught in schools is white history. Not this one. This history is Black AF. 

Barbra Streisand’s memoir, My Name is Barbra, tells the story  of her life and career, from growing up in Brooklyn to her first star-making appearances in New York nightclubs to her breakout performance in Funny Girl on stage and to directing film and touring and recording; the book is, like Barbra herself, frank, funny, opinionated, and charming. 

I was looking at old photos this morning and came across this one of Carlos and me on our first date, which lasted eleven days in July 2000 when I flew from Sacramento to Miami to meet him. This is from our days in Key West on that first date.

What a couple of babies …

Laura Loomer is a MAGAt and prime example of the LauraLunacy of the cult …

She recently Tweeted that if Mr-Former-Fake-One-Term-Twice-Impeached-Currently-Four-Time-Criminally-Indicted-Not-My-President-Gurl was removed from ballots and prevented from being the GOP nominee that she will never vote in an election again and will use her platforms and her lists to make sure millions of Republicans never vote again either.

Um … do it.

This is Lukasz Zarazowski, Polish actor, model, fitness trainer and the current member of the Would You Hit It club; so, would you?

This Bitch: Ryan Walters

Out there in Oklahoma, the state’s far-rightwingnut superintendent of public instruction, Ryan Walters, wants the schools in his state to teach students about the Tulsa Race Massacre, as long as they don’t teach that it was about white supremacist murdering Black people for EWB … existing while Black.

If you haven’t heard about the Tulsa Race Massacre, maybe take a gander here … Tulsa Race Massacre: We Can't Fix Racism If We Don't Learn From It  … at one of the vile parts of American history.

This post isn’t about that necessarily though it is about teaching about the massacre, but it’s mostly about Ryan Walters, who took office in January, and who is, big surprise, anti-CRT [Critical Race Theory] because the right believes that if you teach white children about racism and white supremacy you’ll make them feel bad about themselves.

Here’s the deal: I’m a grown-assed man and I was never taught about the Tulsa Race Massacre, though I learned of other examples of racism in America … Slavery … Emmett Till .. Rosa Parks … church bombings … Medgar Evers … Martin Luther King … Selma … and so much more.

And yet how many of these topics aren’t taught in school, save for the obligatory hour or two spent on slavery, or a couple of classes about Civil Rights; if we fail to learn from history we’re doomed to repeat it and we are on that precipice again thanks to people like Ryan Walters who doesn’t want it taught lest white people get their feelings hurt. So I will say this once more:

I don’t feel bad about being white in America because I had nothing to do with that massacre or any of those other events; I feel horrible for what was done to Black citizens of Tulsa, who had their homes and businesses destroyed and those who lost their lives because of hate and I loathe the fact that much of that still goes on today, but how can we teach our young people, any people, that hate is wrong, that hate kills, if we don’t teach them  the history of hate?

Ryan Walters recently held a public forum at which someone in the crowd asked him how teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre doesn’t violate his ban on CRT and he said:

“I would never tell a kid that because of your race, because of the color of your skin, or your gender or anything like that, you are less of a person or are inherently racist. That doesn’t mean you don’t judge the actions of individuals. Oh, you can. Absolutely, historically, you should … But to say it was inherent in that because of their skin is where I say that is critical race theory. You’re saying that race defines a person.”

You are not a racist because you’re white; you’re a racist because you’re a racist and never learned any better and yet Walters does not want children to be taught that; but the Tulsa Race Massacre was all about race, hell, it’s been called the Tulsa Race Massacre for over a hundred years!

The Tulsa Race Massacre occurred because a young Black man may have, or actually may not have, brushed up against a white woman in an elevator. And because a Black man might have touched a white woman, he was arrested, and a mob gathered at the courthouse demanding the right to lynch that young man. When the crowd of white men, many of whom were deputized before the massacre began, didn’t get their wish to lynch that young man, they marched to the Greenwood District in Tulsa, a thriving Black neighborhood also called Black Wall Street, and destroyed it, burned it to the ground, set private homes on fire, leaving 100,000 people homeless, and murdered some 300 Black people; it was all about race.

It was all about a Black man allegedly disrespecting a white woman in the eyes of white men, and if we don’t teach that to our children they will never learn. And we’ll see it happen again.

Lastly, let this sink in: Ryan Walters has no problem teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre as long as you don’t mention race.

 The Republic

Freedom Day ... But The March Goes On

This particular National holiday’s origin story began in 1865, in Galveston, Texas, which was at that time the western-most area of the Union, when Union soldiers arrived to tell the enslaved people of their emancipation on June 19, 1865.

Now, those enslaved people had technically already been freed two-and-a-half years earlier when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but slaveholders in Texas kept the information to themselves, extending the period of violent exploitation of enslaved African Americans for two more years.

But in 1865 the news spread: freedom. And the following year, in 1866, a celebration was had in Texas on that same date, June 19^th … Juneteenth … to finally recognize freedom from slavery in the United States.

Of course, here we are in 2023, one-hundred-fifty-eight years later, and we know African-Americans still aren’t entirely free; think of George Floyd and Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice and Eric Garner and Breonna Taylor and Michael Brown and Freddie Gray and on and on we could go …

We still have much work to do to free all Americans, of every race and color and gender and sexual orientation.

We need to free People of Color from the abuses of police and the criminal justice system and some in our own government that work to deny them the right to vote.

We need to free Women from having the government control their bodies.

We need to free Educators to teach American history, all of it, even the ugly parts.

We need to free Parents to be able to raise their own children as they see fit; to let their children read the books of their choosing; to let the parents make healthcare choices for their own children.

We need to free our Trans Brothers and Sisters to live their lives as they identify; to be fully themselves.

We need to free the LGBTQ+ population from continued harassment and violence by rightwing agitators and politicians trying to turn the clock back to the closet.

We are, none of us, free, until we are all free, and there is still work to be done.

The Funny Papers

Clay Bennett, Ed Wexler, Mike Luckovich, Michael de Adder, JD Crowe, Bill Bramhall, David Horsey, Kevin Siers, Adam Zyglis, Tim Campbell, Ed Hall, Nick Anderson, Chris Britt, Marc Murphy, Macleod