[This week I’ve featured a series on histories, figures, and texts to help us better remember Decoration Day, the holiday that preceded and evolved into Memorial Day. Leading up to this special post on the significance of these histories here in 2026.]
On what three histories connected to Decoration Day can help remind us in this most fraught national moment. [A complement to yesterday’s post, where I argued for why we should remember Decoration as well as Memorial Day.]
If we remember how and why Decoration Day came to be, one of the two main subjects of this entire weeklong blog series, it reminds us of a few interconnected and crucial facts: that no community has expressed more consistent and compelling critical patriotism than have African Americans; that those expressions have likewise consistently and compellingly shaped our collective national story, often in ways that are easily overlooked (especially when they’re purposefully minimized, on which more in a moment); and that if we can push back on the overlooking and really remember these foundational histories, they offer us moments and emphases that truly symbolize the best of America and that literally every American who is not a white supremacist can and should be proud of. I don’t know a more succinct and striking example than formerly enslaved people bringing flowers to the graves of U.S. Army soldiers in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.
If we remember how and why those inspiring Decoration Day histories were purposefully minimized and then collectively forgotten in favor of the more unifying (read: white-centered) concept of Memorial Day, the other main subject of this weeklong blog series, it likewise reminds us of a couple interconnected and crucial facts: that the absence, for nearly all of American history, of Black histories from our national collective memories has always been first and foremost an intended effect of white supremacist perspectives (see the 1877 Nation quote featured in Thursday’s post hoping that “the Negro will disappear from the field of national politics”); and that, for anyone who complains about “revisionist histories” when it comes to efforts to complicate narratives of Memorial Day (and anything and everything else), the simple truth is that the revisionists have always been the white supremacists, and that trying to return to our more genuine, diverse foundational histories and stories is the far more accurate, and I would argue infinitely more American, goal.
And if we really think about what drives those recent efforts, by this AmericanStudier but also so many other folks (like David Blight, as I traced in Monday’s post; or Andy Hall and Ta-Nehisi Coates, as I highlighted in Tuesday’s post), it helps us make a clear and crucial argument in response to those who would claim (as the Trump administration has for the last year and a half) that “DEI” or “woke histories” are in any way divisive. On Decoration Day, Black Americans and their allies honored fallen American soldiers, supported our troops and our wounded warriors and all the other phrases to which the Right has long paid lip-service. If Memorial Day were simply an expanded version of that starting point, one that featured Decoration Day and its histories as well as connecting to all other conflicts and their casualties, it would be, well, exactly what we’re arguing for. It’s the white supremacist erasure and its legacies that are and have always been divisive, and that require our collective work to challenge and change into a more accurate and, again, infinitely more American story.
Next series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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