"Who Tells the Story?" A Memorial Day Sermon 2018
Tomorrow, like many of you, I’ll be in my yard, enjoying grilled food and visiting with friends and family. I won’t be at a parade. I won’t hang a flag from my house. I won’t be mourning the loss of a loved one. I admit that Memorial Day has had little meaning to me. I don’t come from a military family. My father, George, never fought in a war or served in uniform. Neither did my mother, or any of my grandparents or brothers. My step-dad, Marty, was in the Navy as a young man and my current step-dad, Peter, a Marine, but neither of them died in war.
It’s hard for me to fathom the sacrifice that individuals make serving in the armed forces. It’s even harder to imagine having a loved one go off to war and then not come home. I know what it means to grieve the loss of someone I love. But sorting through the complexity and carnage of war on top of that grief is more than anyone should have to bear, yet so many have. It is important to recognize and honor those individuals and families who have sacrificed so much to protect liberty and justice for all. I am grateful to those who serve in our armed forces. Yet, I despise war and militarism. It would be dishonest to glorify soldiers and not acknowledge the tremendous costs of war - the lives lost and forever changed. Memorial Day should not just be about mourning those who have died in battle, although their sacrifice and bravery is honorable. It should be a time of collective mourning for the shattering of peace and beloved community that accompanies every war.
There are those who feel that there is no such thing as a just war, that war is in every case a far too costly abomination. There are those who believe there are some causes that must be fought for, that power concedes nothing without a fight. Ending slavery and the Holocaust were arguable just causes for war and perhaps the only way those horrors could end. There are also those who think war is just if it is fought to protect one’s way of life, no matter the impact of that way of life on another’s.
Honoring the military without glorifying war has been a struggle in our nation and in this congregation, particularly since the end of the Vietnam War. Many in this church have wrestled with peace, justice, and how to support our troops, while being ambivalent to the necessity and justification of war. Our Peace and Justice Team with the Military Bridge Builders lit the chalice together today and, in fact, many of the same folks serve on both teams. In 2007, with the support of this congregation and at the request of Rev. Barbara Pescan, David Pyle and Seanan Holland, then Meadville Lombard students, began a ministry to recruits at the Great Lakes Naval base, providing a worship space that was accepting and affirming, preaching love and hope rather than fear.
I loved meeting the Naval recruits that we hosted here this last Thanksgiving. I believe that our armed forces can help to spread peace and democracy in the world. The military can be a pathway out of poverty and a provider of training and education for many young people. Yet, I’m deeply troubled by increased militarization and the way we are abandoning diplomacy. The inflamed nationalism, hawkishness, and careless aggression we are displaying in the world is terrifying. I want to honor the individuals who serve and have given their lives to serve, along with the families who love them, even though I oppose many of the policies and practices of our government that send them into harm’s way.
We can’t truly pay tribute to those who have given their lives if we can’t look honestly at the causes they served. We will never heal from the wounds of our past until we can look at the entirety of it. We will never honor the memories of our dead without knowing fully who we are collectively.
It’s funny what we remember, and what memories seem to drop out of our minds like falling leaves. A little more than a year ago, I was driving from Elgin to Palatine, from a minister’s gathering to my internship site, when I approached a familiar stretch of road. It borders the cemetery where my father is buried. I didn’t have time to stop and it was cold outside, so I thought I’d just keep going, just like I had many times before. But before I knew it, my car was turning right and then right again, past the iron gates, then around a curving drive until my car stopped. I got out and walked up a small hill to a half-circle of bare shrubs. I looked down to see the headstone of my father, George C. Riley. I hadn’t been there for 20 years, but my memory simply took me to the precise place. I used to visit pretty often as a kid, with my Auntie who wanted me to remember him well. We were there when they moved him from one spot, where he was placed by mistake, to this spot, in this memorable half circle of shrubs, near the corner of Roselle and Algonquin Roads.
I knew it had been 20 years since I’d been there because that was when we buried my step-father, Marty. Standing at my father’s headstone, this spot where my memories directed me, I turned around and tried to find my step-father’s headstone. I knew it was fairly close by. Marty had been a father to me, longer and more capably than my own, biological father. But I could not find his headstone. I called my mom and asked her to help me find it. I searched row by row in the grass at each flat stone marker in the area where I thought he was. I decided I’d come back another day.
The next time I drove by, on a sunnier day, I went again to my father’s grave, and then I tried to find my stepfather’s. Again, I searched to no avail. Finally, I went to the cemetery office and asked for a map. They showed me that my stepfather’s marker was right where I had been. They told me to look for the family of Ryan. I had seen those names. I went back to the place I had been and almost immediately found the headstone – Martin C. Dunn. I had been standing right there, all along, practically on top of it, and couldn’t see it.
Memory is selective alright. It could be that I remembered where my father was buried because I had been there to see it more often and perhaps at an age when memory was more pliant. Or it could have been because there was a distinctive marker, those shrubs that seemed to hug the place where he was and made it easier to find. Whatever the reason, it was clear to me that my memory fills in certain things and leaves out other, significant details. The stories we tell and re-tell, the histories we create are incomplete, often with missing pieces. Sometimes pieces intentionally wiped out.
The story Mary shared with us about Lumpkin’s Jail, is just one example of partial memory and incomplete memorialization. It illustrates the way we often fail to memorialize the more difficult parts of our collective story. The story of Memorial Day itself is often not told in full. It is a commemoration sometimes thought to have begun after World War I but as Mary mentioned, it began at the end of the Civil War.
It actually began as a series of commemorations, in the ruined city of Charleston, South Carolina, led mostly by African Americans who were emancipated from slavery. These freed people honored Union soldiers who had fought for their freedom. David W. Blight, professor of American History at Yale University, writes about the origins of Memorial Day in his book, Race and Reunion, as well as in several articles on the subject. He uncovered this buried history in the archives at Harvard, including evidence of the largest of the commemorations that took place on May 1st, 1865 in what is now called Hampton Park. At the time, it was a horse track, owned by slave owners, called Washington Race Course and Jockey Park. In the last year of the war, the race track served as an outdoor prison for Union soldiers, who were kept in awful conditions. Two hundred fifty-seven of them died of disease and were carelessly buried.
When whites retreated from Charleston, black workmen found the site, re-buried the dead, and inscribed “Martyrs of the Race Course” over the entrance. Thousands of black people, many of them children, and including black troops that fought for the Union, processed around the track, carrying flowers and singing songs of freedom.
“In the struggle over memory and meaning in any society, some stories just get lost while others attain mainstream recognition.” Writes Blight.[1]
This story doesn’t get told for a reason. It was purposefully forgotten, buried from memory and covered over with flowers. Within a few decades following that first Memorial Day, the bodies buried there were reinterred at a National cemetery 75 miles away, the park was renamed after Confederate General, Wade Hampton III, who enslaved more people than almost anyone in the south. A look at the Hampton Park website today, shows a lovely gazebo and grassy area but nothing that recognizes that it was the site of the first Memorial Day commemoration or any word that points to the fact that, in that place, formerly enslaved people mourned those who had fought to free them.
Frederick Douglass, in his 1871 Decoration Day speech, implores listeners to remember what the Civil War was fought for. And to not, “forget the difference between the parties to that terrible, protracted, and bloody conflict.” The Civil War was about a state’s rights to own slaves. It was about one side wanting to cleave the country rather than forgo the holding of human beings in bondage. The other side was fighting to end slavery and keep the country united. Each soldier who fights in a war is a life lost tragically. Those lives deserve recognition and honor because they are human lives lost in the awful carnage of war. But let us not pretend that the fight to preserve slavery and the fight to end it were equally valid. Let us not honor the very fine people on both sides of racism, as if it were simply a difference of opinion. In this country, we honor, with monument after monument, white male Confederate Generals, who fought and led thousands to fight and die to preserve an institution so evil, which has so decimated our moral character and with which we have never as a nation reckoned. In this country, we argue that honoring those who have fought to enslave human beings is the same as honoring those who have fought for equality and freedom for all. So many monuments remain standing in the South to commemorate Confederate soldiers without recognizing the countless lives lost and broken by a system of racial oppression so pervasive that it has not died but morphed in a thousand ways. Honoring those who fought and died without looking honestly at what they fought and died for corrodes our integrity.
Watching white nationalists and white supremacists march in Charlottesville, Virginia last summer, I felt angry that this violence was erupting over statues. But I know it’s not about mere statues. The monuments and flags are only symbols for the racism that remains. It matters what and who and how we memorialize. Through our memorials, we tell the story of whose lives matter most.
None of this is to say that selective memory and incomplete recognition of history only exists in the Southern states. The North was complicit in slavery and benefitted economically from it. Racism has lived and flourished in the North in often more difficult to decipher systems of oppression. White supremacy pervades all of our institutions, including our own Unitarian Universalist Association. No one and nothing is immune to the forces of supremacy. We are struggling to dismantle systemic racism in our churches and our larger association and it isn’t easy. I was reminded of the messiness and imperfection of our democratic process last week at our annual meeting. But struggle we must – to be honest, to listen to one another fully, to make room for the voices of those who are least often heard, to tell the difficult truths that don’t often get told.
Bryan Stevenson, of the Equal Justice Initiative, talks about changing the narrative as one of the key components of equity and justice. We must pay attention to what stories are told, who is telling them and why. In our social media world of spoon fed misinformation, where it is hard to know what is true, we need to listen to the voices that are drowned out by the blustering and fear mongering of abusive power.
The truth of Memorial Day is that those who died in uniform in wars with defined beginnings and ends, with named battles and 4 Star Generals, are honored and recognized. There are also millions who have died on slave ships, tossed into the ocean, slaughtered in fields, torn by the whip, or hung from a tree. There are those who have died, separated from their children and their parents, those who were raped and murdered for claiming their right to be free, those who are the soldiers of a war lasting hundreds of years, which we do not recognize. It is a war claimed to have ended 150 years ago but whose battles have raged on through its descendants in the form of share cropping, convict leasing, segregation, mass incarceration, and redlining. Institutionalized and systemic racism has found robust and insidious ways to express itself.
The Equal Justice Initiative is helping to tell some of the stories that aren’t often told and memorializing those who have died in an unrecognized war. The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice have just opened this spring in Alabama to acknowledge the profound and ongoing impact of racism. The National Memorial commemorates those murdered by lynching, with large, steel, hanging columns – one for each of the more than 800 counties where lynching occurred. Lynching, a system of societally and governmentally sanctioned terrorism, claimed more than 4400 lives between 1877 and 1950, and spread fear in the lives of millions more. Each county can claim a matching monument to mark their history and they are being erected across the south. The partner Legacy Museum is built on the site “where enslaved black people were imprisoned.” It tells our history of slavery to mass incarceration and memorializes those who have died on racisms battlefront, so that we can begin to truly liberate us all from its devastation. Without truth, Bryan Stevenson points out, there can be no reconciliation.
It is hard to hold the whole truth and to look at history from multiple perspectives. Over and over, we fail to count the civilian dead. It is simpler, though certainly not easy, to mourn those who have bravely fought in uniform. It is simpler still to have a picnic and wave a flag without knowing the meaning of the rituals we engage in. We are the meaning makers, the truth seekers, the justice builders, the bringers of peace. We are also the perpetuators of evil, the terrorists, the rebels, the forgotten and unknown soldiers. We are part of the interconnected web of harm and healing, of bondage and freedom. As we honor and mourn those who knowingly put themselves in harm’s way to fight for freedom, let us not forget those whose freedom and lives were stolen from them to help build this land we cherish.
This Memorial Day, may we remember those who have died protecting freedom and those whose lives were taken without honor or consent. May we continue to fill in the missing pieces of our memories and may the full story and honest truth set us all free.
Resources included:
Michelle Richards UU World Article, “Remembering Liberation on Memorial Day” dtd 5/30/2011
https://www.uuworld.org/articles/remembering-liberation
The Unknown Loyal Dead by Frederick Douglas, Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia on Decoration Day, May 30, 1871. Here with commentary by Ta-Nehisi Coates
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/01/the-other-decoration-day-speech/69782/
The Story for All Ages was adapted by Dr. Mary Shelden from “God’s Half Acre,” in Lies Across America by James Loewen (who we learned is a Unitarian Universalist)
[1] “Forgetting Why We Remember” by David W. Blight May 29, 2011 NY Times Op Ed
It’s hard for me to fathom the sacrifice that individuals make serving in the armed forces. It’s even harder to imagine having a loved one go off to war and then not come home. I know what it means to grieve the loss of someone I love. But sorting through the complexity and carnage of war on top of that grief is more than anyone should have to bear, yet so many have. It is important to recognize and honor those individuals and families who have sacrificed so much to protect liberty and justice for all. I am grateful to those who serve in our armed forces. Yet, I despise war and militarism. It would be dishonest to glorify soldiers and not acknowledge the tremendous costs of war - the lives lost and forever changed. Memorial Day should not just be about mourning those who have died in battle, although their sacrifice and bravery is honorable. It should be a time of collective mourning for the shattering of peace and beloved community that accompanies every war.
There are those who feel that there is no such thing as a just war, that war is in every case a far too costly abomination. There are those who believe there are some causes that must be fought for, that power concedes nothing without a fight. Ending slavery and the Holocaust were arguable just causes for war and perhaps the only way those horrors could end. There are also those who think war is just if it is fought to protect one’s way of life, no matter the impact of that way of life on another’s.
Honoring the military without glorifying war has been a struggle in our nation and in this congregation, particularly since the end of the Vietnam War. Many in this church have wrestled with peace, justice, and how to support our troops, while being ambivalent to the necessity and justification of war. Our Peace and Justice Team with the Military Bridge Builders lit the chalice together today and, in fact, many of the same folks serve on both teams. In 2007, with the support of this congregation and at the request of Rev. Barbara Pescan, David Pyle and Seanan Holland, then Meadville Lombard students, began a ministry to recruits at the Great Lakes Naval base, providing a worship space that was accepting and affirming, preaching love and hope rather than fear.
I loved meeting the Naval recruits that we hosted here this last Thanksgiving. I believe that our armed forces can help to spread peace and democracy in the world. The military can be a pathway out of poverty and a provider of training and education for many young people. Yet, I’m deeply troubled by increased militarization and the way we are abandoning diplomacy. The inflamed nationalism, hawkishness, and careless aggression we are displaying in the world is terrifying. I want to honor the individuals who serve and have given their lives to serve, along with the families who love them, even though I oppose many of the policies and practices of our government that send them into harm’s way.
We can’t truly pay tribute to those who have given their lives if we can’t look honestly at the causes they served. We will never heal from the wounds of our past until we can look at the entirety of it. We will never honor the memories of our dead without knowing fully who we are collectively.
It’s funny what we remember, and what memories seem to drop out of our minds like falling leaves. A little more than a year ago, I was driving from Elgin to Palatine, from a minister’s gathering to my internship site, when I approached a familiar stretch of road. It borders the cemetery where my father is buried. I didn’t have time to stop and it was cold outside, so I thought I’d just keep going, just like I had many times before. But before I knew it, my car was turning right and then right again, past the iron gates, then around a curving drive until my car stopped. I got out and walked up a small hill to a half-circle of bare shrubs. I looked down to see the headstone of my father, George C. Riley. I hadn’t been there for 20 years, but my memory simply took me to the precise place. I used to visit pretty often as a kid, with my Auntie who wanted me to remember him well. We were there when they moved him from one spot, where he was placed by mistake, to this spot, in this memorable half circle of shrubs, near the corner of Roselle and Algonquin Roads.
I knew it had been 20 years since I’d been there because that was when we buried my step-father, Marty. Standing at my father’s headstone, this spot where my memories directed me, I turned around and tried to find my step-father’s headstone. I knew it was fairly close by. Marty had been a father to me, longer and more capably than my own, biological father. But I could not find his headstone. I called my mom and asked her to help me find it. I searched row by row in the grass at each flat stone marker in the area where I thought he was. I decided I’d come back another day.
The next time I drove by, on a sunnier day, I went again to my father’s grave, and then I tried to find my stepfather’s. Again, I searched to no avail. Finally, I went to the cemetery office and asked for a map. They showed me that my stepfather’s marker was right where I had been. They told me to look for the family of Ryan. I had seen those names. I went back to the place I had been and almost immediately found the headstone – Martin C. Dunn. I had been standing right there, all along, practically on top of it, and couldn’t see it.
Memory is selective alright. It could be that I remembered where my father was buried because I had been there to see it more often and perhaps at an age when memory was more pliant. Or it could have been because there was a distinctive marker, those shrubs that seemed to hug the place where he was and made it easier to find. Whatever the reason, it was clear to me that my memory fills in certain things and leaves out other, significant details. The stories we tell and re-tell, the histories we create are incomplete, often with missing pieces. Sometimes pieces intentionally wiped out.
The story Mary shared with us about Lumpkin’s Jail, is just one example of partial memory and incomplete memorialization. It illustrates the way we often fail to memorialize the more difficult parts of our collective story. The story of Memorial Day itself is often not told in full. It is a commemoration sometimes thought to have begun after World War I but as Mary mentioned, it began at the end of the Civil War.
It actually began as a series of commemorations, in the ruined city of Charleston, South Carolina, led mostly by African Americans who were emancipated from slavery. These freed people honored Union soldiers who had fought for their freedom. David W. Blight, professor of American History at Yale University, writes about the origins of Memorial Day in his book, Race and Reunion, as well as in several articles on the subject. He uncovered this buried history in the archives at Harvard, including evidence of the largest of the commemorations that took place on May 1st, 1865 in what is now called Hampton Park. At the time, it was a horse track, owned by slave owners, called Washington Race Course and Jockey Park. In the last year of the war, the race track served as an outdoor prison for Union soldiers, who were kept in awful conditions. Two hundred fifty-seven of them died of disease and were carelessly buried.
When whites retreated from Charleston, black workmen found the site, re-buried the dead, and inscribed “Martyrs of the Race Course” over the entrance. Thousands of black people, many of them children, and including black troops that fought for the Union, processed around the track, carrying flowers and singing songs of freedom.
“In the struggle over memory and meaning in any society, some stories just get lost while others attain mainstream recognition.” Writes Blight.[1]
This story doesn’t get told for a reason. It was purposefully forgotten, buried from memory and covered over with flowers. Within a few decades following that first Memorial Day, the bodies buried there were reinterred at a National cemetery 75 miles away, the park was renamed after Confederate General, Wade Hampton III, who enslaved more people than almost anyone in the south. A look at the Hampton Park website today, shows a lovely gazebo and grassy area but nothing that recognizes that it was the site of the first Memorial Day commemoration or any word that points to the fact that, in that place, formerly enslaved people mourned those who had fought to free them.
Frederick Douglass, in his 1871 Decoration Day speech, implores listeners to remember what the Civil War was fought for. And to not, “forget the difference between the parties to that terrible, protracted, and bloody conflict.” The Civil War was about a state’s rights to own slaves. It was about one side wanting to cleave the country rather than forgo the holding of human beings in bondage. The other side was fighting to end slavery and keep the country united. Each soldier who fights in a war is a life lost tragically. Those lives deserve recognition and honor because they are human lives lost in the awful carnage of war. But let us not pretend that the fight to preserve slavery and the fight to end it were equally valid. Let us not honor the very fine people on both sides of racism, as if it were simply a difference of opinion. In this country, we honor, with monument after monument, white male Confederate Generals, who fought and led thousands to fight and die to preserve an institution so evil, which has so decimated our moral character and with which we have never as a nation reckoned. In this country, we argue that honoring those who have fought to enslave human beings is the same as honoring those who have fought for equality and freedom for all. So many monuments remain standing in the South to commemorate Confederate soldiers without recognizing the countless lives lost and broken by a system of racial oppression so pervasive that it has not died but morphed in a thousand ways. Honoring those who fought and died without looking honestly at what they fought and died for corrodes our integrity.
Watching white nationalists and white supremacists march in Charlottesville, Virginia last summer, I felt angry that this violence was erupting over statues. But I know it’s not about mere statues. The monuments and flags are only symbols for the racism that remains. It matters what and who and how we memorialize. Through our memorials, we tell the story of whose lives matter most.
None of this is to say that selective memory and incomplete recognition of history only exists in the Southern states. The North was complicit in slavery and benefitted economically from it. Racism has lived and flourished in the North in often more difficult to decipher systems of oppression. White supremacy pervades all of our institutions, including our own Unitarian Universalist Association. No one and nothing is immune to the forces of supremacy. We are struggling to dismantle systemic racism in our churches and our larger association and it isn’t easy. I was reminded of the messiness and imperfection of our democratic process last week at our annual meeting. But struggle we must – to be honest, to listen to one another fully, to make room for the voices of those who are least often heard, to tell the difficult truths that don’t often get told.
Bryan Stevenson, of the Equal Justice Initiative, talks about changing the narrative as one of the key components of equity and justice. We must pay attention to what stories are told, who is telling them and why. In our social media world of spoon fed misinformation, where it is hard to know what is true, we need to listen to the voices that are drowned out by the blustering and fear mongering of abusive power.
The truth of Memorial Day is that those who died in uniform in wars with defined beginnings and ends, with named battles and 4 Star Generals, are honored and recognized. There are also millions who have died on slave ships, tossed into the ocean, slaughtered in fields, torn by the whip, or hung from a tree. There are those who have died, separated from their children and their parents, those who were raped and murdered for claiming their right to be free, those who are the soldiers of a war lasting hundreds of years, which we do not recognize. It is a war claimed to have ended 150 years ago but whose battles have raged on through its descendants in the form of share cropping, convict leasing, segregation, mass incarceration, and redlining. Institutionalized and systemic racism has found robust and insidious ways to express itself.
The Equal Justice Initiative is helping to tell some of the stories that aren’t often told and memorializing those who have died in an unrecognized war. The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice have just opened this spring in Alabama to acknowledge the profound and ongoing impact of racism. The National Memorial commemorates those murdered by lynching, with large, steel, hanging columns – one for each of the more than 800 counties where lynching occurred. Lynching, a system of societally and governmentally sanctioned terrorism, claimed more than 4400 lives between 1877 and 1950, and spread fear in the lives of millions more. Each county can claim a matching monument to mark their history and they are being erected across the south. The partner Legacy Museum is built on the site “where enslaved black people were imprisoned.” It tells our history of slavery to mass incarceration and memorializes those who have died on racisms battlefront, so that we can begin to truly liberate us all from its devastation. Without truth, Bryan Stevenson points out, there can be no reconciliation.
It is hard to hold the whole truth and to look at history from multiple perspectives. Over and over, we fail to count the civilian dead. It is simpler, though certainly not easy, to mourn those who have bravely fought in uniform. It is simpler still to have a picnic and wave a flag without knowing the meaning of the rituals we engage in. We are the meaning makers, the truth seekers, the justice builders, the bringers of peace. We are also the perpetuators of evil, the terrorists, the rebels, the forgotten and unknown soldiers. We are part of the interconnected web of harm and healing, of bondage and freedom. As we honor and mourn those who knowingly put themselves in harm’s way to fight for freedom, let us not forget those whose freedom and lives were stolen from them to help build this land we cherish.
This Memorial Day, may we remember those who have died protecting freedom and those whose lives were taken without honor or consent. May we continue to fill in the missing pieces of our memories and may the full story and honest truth set us all free.
Resources included:
Michelle Richards UU World Article, “Remembering Liberation on Memorial Day” dtd 5/30/2011
https://www.uuworld.org/articles/remembering-liberation
The Unknown Loyal Dead by Frederick Douglas, Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia on Decoration Day, May 30, 1871. Here with commentary by Ta-Nehisi Coates
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/01/the-other-decoration-day-speech/69782/
The Story for All Ages was adapted by Dr. Mary Shelden from “God’s Half Acre,” in Lies Across America by James Loewen (who we learned is a Unitarian Universalist)
[1] “Forgetting Why We Remember” by David W. Blight May 29, 2011 NY Times Op Ed