"MEMORIAL DAY"

 “MEMORIAL DAY”

    According to historian David Blight, Memorial Day was started by formerly ensIaved African-Americans on May 1, 1865, just a few weeks after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox.  It happened in Charleston, SC, to honor 257 dead Union soldiers who had been buried in a mass grave in a Confederate prison camp.  They dug up the bodies over a two week period and buried them properly, with a processional of many thousands bringing flowers to honor the service of the soldiers who had helped to end slavery.   

    I served my country as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War from 1970-72.  My alternative service was a staff person (and later director) of Opportunity House in Nashville, a halfway house for men being released from prison.  It was here that I got my first glimpse of the horror that is the American prison-industrial complex.  It was quite an education for me, and ever since then I have been involved in ministry to those in prison in one form or another.  

    Because of my CO status, Memorial Day is always complicated for me.  I honor the men and women who serve our country in the military.  My adopted father, Gay Wilmore, served in the US army in World War II.  In the midst of my ambivalence about Memorial Day and about nonviolence and the efficacy of violence in service of social justice, I want to give thanks to my father-in-law Herman Leach, to my father, to Charlie Callier, to Bob Wetzel, and to so many others who have served our country.   My mother’s almost fiancé, Bob Buford, was killed in WW II.  I was in seminary and gave up my deferred status in 1970 in order to try to start a movement with others to end deferments for ministers and seminary students.  I never felt that the Vietnam War was anything but a misguided attempt to kill and maim people of a different color.  In saying this, I do not intend to demean the Americans who served there – I had two friends killed in that war.  

    My longtime friend John Cole Vodicka also has a complicated history with Memorial Day, but I will save that story for another day.  In his great ministry as a human rights’ advocate and prisoners’ rights advocate, he has found a powerful way to recognize Memorial Day – to honor those Black veterans of World War II who are known to have been lynched in Georgia after they returned home from serving their country.  This past Friday he led a group of 60+ people in remembering these 9 men, some of whom were lynched while still in uniform.  There was a strong article by Ernie Suggs about this in last Friday’s AJC – here is the ink to it  https://www.ajc.com/news/different-kind-of-memorial-day-marks-black-soldiers-deaths-in-georgia/QZZYNR2SIZB7NL3QWIWOGA6K6Q/

Here are the names of the 9 Black men who fought for freedom overseas and were lynched in Georgia as a result of their service:  Felix Hall, Willie Lee Davis, George Franks, Curtis Hairston, Maceo Snipes, George Dorsey, Walter Lee Johnson, Joe Nathan Roberts, and Lemuel Penn.  With his permission, I am including John’s remarks at Friday’s service.

“Why we are here:

The Memorial Day weekend is a time for all of us to remember the nine known African American WWII veterans who died not in Germany or France or North Africa or Japan or on some remote Pacific Island, but who were lynched by their own countrymen in Georgia. In the United States of America.  

 These nine men enlisted, perhaps with the hope that fighting for America in the “war to destroy fascism and preserve democracy” would earn them respect and human dignity at home—something they’d not experienced in their own country. 

 Instead, these Black soldiers were targeted by white terrorists while they were on active duty or after returning to their homes. White America feared that Black veterans asserting and demanding equality would disrupt the social order built on white supremacy and that Black soldiers would reject their second-class status in the country’s racial hierarchy.  These nine veterans became a threat to the country’s—and especially the South’s, and Georgia’s—caste system.  Black WWII veterans threatened to upend the myth of racial superiority.  Racial insubordination had to be swiftly and violently crushed.  

 Athens’ Veterans Memorial Plaza sits adjacent to the county’s courthouse. The courthouse, in my estimation, is in many respects the present-day place where Black women and men are routinely and systematically subjugated by a system that believes Black lives don’t matter.”

    Thanks, John, for your witness and courage, and thanks to all who have served (and who now serve) to develop and deepen our commitment to the idea of equality:  that all people are created with equal dignity in God’s eyes.