Public remembrances, US and elsewhere

Here in Virginia, we are currently suspended between “Lee-Jackson Day”, which was celebrated as a state-wide holiday on Friday, and “Martin Luther King Day”, celebrated as a holiday both state-wide and nationally, tomorrow.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, 1929-1968, was a world-renowned nonviolent struggler for the cause of human equality, and against the war in Vietnam. Robert E. Lee, 1807 – 1870, was a career army officer who commanded all the Confederate armies during the American Civil War. Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, 1824 – 1863, was a Virginia teacher who served as a corps commander in the (Confederate) Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee.
Back in the 1980s, when I was newly here in the US, there was a big nationwide discussion over the idea of adding a remembrance of King Day to the national calendar. I think it actually did happen then, under President Reagan. But states were still free to give their own employees the day off on King Day or not, as they chose. At some point there, Virginia, a southern state in which pro-Confederate sentiment still runs strong in some places, effected a compromise by having a “joint” public holiday for all three of these men– Lee-King-Jackson Day, which sandwiched poor Dr. King’s memory between that of two Confederate generals.
In recent years– I can’t remember exactly when, but since we moved here in ’97– the two days got disaggregated, so at least Dr. King doesn’t have to put up with those old secessionist (and deeply segregationist) bedfellows. And state employees here, and schoolkids etc, get two days off in mid-January instead of one.
What are we celebrating on “Lee-Jackson Day”, pray?
Anyway, we had a South African friend staying over the weekend. He told us how in his country, previously “divisive” public holidays have been replaced by intentionally inclusive and pro-reconciliation remembrances, which I think is a great idea. He said that even Soweto Uprising Day, which the ANC always used to mark every year on June 16, has now been rebranded as “Children’s Rights Day.” And various days that previously were celebrations of famous Afrikaaner victories etc have been rebranded as “Reconciliation Day” or whatever.
If the South Africans can do that, so soon after 1994– surely we here in Virginia could do something similar, and not have these divisive and highly personalized holidays? I mean, I know that celebrating Dr. King’s heritage is supposed to be a unifying thing to do, and in a way it is. (Can the same possibly be said of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson?) But maybe it would be better to just have one mid-January holiday and call it “Equality Day” or “Reconciliation Day”, celebrating the values for which Dr. King struggled rather than the one individual himself…

22 thoughts on “Public remembrances, US and elsewhere”

  1. “Rekonsilyasyon San Jistis, NON!”
    That’s a Haitian slogan and I agree with it.
    The compromising of our South African liberation symbols and days of celebration in the negotiations before 1994 is a sore point.
    The Y-front flag that we have is meaningless. The black, green and gold tricolour was always the “national flag” during the liberation struggle.
    As for the days, there is practically nothing in the national calendar of significance. Of course this does not expunge people’s memories. June 16th may be blandly called “Youth Day” but it does not stop people remembering Soweto on that day.
    But what it does is to give a licence to carping begrudgers who want to raise their voices against such memorials. In your case, if you were to change King’s day into “Equality Day” you would find people getting up each year to protest against memorialising King on the grounds that it is divisive or some such nonsense. I would’nt go that way if I were you.
    At least we do still have May Day, the universal workers’ day, by the way. And we do know that it started in the USA, let me quickly add.

  2. Helena,
    My understanding is, you want to say that it is better not to celebrate MLK day than to use it as ideological weapon – especially, in these days of cultist warfare. Yes, I really can’t imagine how to connect MLK day with current ME situation anyhow meaningfully 🙁
    First, there is no way to forget that “where is your MLK?” is a generic neocon question to the Muslims. Second, “nonviolent social change” is in the core of neoconservative colored revolutions doctrine. Their strategy includes internal nonviolent subversion as the first stage of hostile regime change. Forced “liberation” comes next.
    Henry James

  3. Your rhetorical question whether Jackson and Lee days are “a unifying thing to do” can be answered “Yes.” Lee’s birthday in Georgia was an occasion when a former governor, the famous segregationist Lester Maddox, for years handed out cards reminding people that January 19 was the birthday of Robert E. Lee. That gesture took the most significance when it corresponded with the third Monday in January. Unifying, indeed, years after such unity is no longer socially acceptable.
    Those of us in the streets before 1964 had an idea that what we were doing might be important, but very few really grasped the full significance of the decade. Only in retrospect did various threads of protest — civil rights, peace (nuclear disarmament), women’s rights (we called it LIBERATION), civil disobedience as an alternative to violence — appear to be part of the same rope. King’s insight that the Vietnam Conflict (sound rather innocuous when you say conflict instead of WAR, doesn’t it?) and the struggle for civil rights at home (again, we called it what it was: FREEDOM!) may have been his most important insight.
    My personal recollection is that his Letter From a Birmingham Jail is more significnt than the famous speech. At the time, the letter seemed to be addressing me as an individual, whereas the speech spoke to the rest of the world.

  5. May Day may have started over here. Now we have the watered down version, “Labor Day.”
    No one in America, I mean NO ONE, celebrates May Day. I say this as someone whose primary work is with labor unions.

  6. Ungrateful Hillary
    Sen. Clinton makes a right point. GOP certainly runs a plantation – with Clintons for house servants.
    DEEPTI HAJELA. Clinton Slams Bush, White House in Harlem
    Sen. Hillary Clinton on Monday blasted the Bush administration as “one of the worst” in U.S. history and compared the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to a plantation where dissenting voices are squelched.
    Speaking during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event, Clinton also offered an apology to a group of Hurricane Katrina survivors “on behalf of a government that left you behind, that turned its back on you.” Her remarks were met with thunderous applause by a mostly black audience at the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem.
    The House “has been run like a plantation, and you know what I’m talking about,” said Clinton, D-N.Y. “It has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard.”

  9. Nobody in the USA celebrates May Day for the workers yousay, Joshua? And you have a bland “Labor Day” instead? Well, this is why I think that having an “Equality Day” instead of King’s day would be useless. It would simply degenerate into another excuse for a Roman-style circus-day for the undifferentiated plebs.
    The holidays don’t work as celebrations of abstractions. They work when they are partisan, and when they celebrate revolutionary victories. These are the times when we remember that it is our divisions that have taken us forward.
    If these occasions are devoted to abstractions they become vehicles for a certain kind of bourgeois propaganda which says we are all equally content with this actually class-divided society. But not even half of us are content. Those rich and satisfied individuals who want to crow and bray on platforms on such days, about how we are all one, are enemies of the people, enemies of equality, and the opposite of MLK. “Equality Day” would inevitably become “Hypocrisy Day”.

  12. Well, Henry, in that post “Second, ‘nonviolent social change’ is in the core of neoconservative colored revoutions doctrine”, etc. you seemed to be implying that nonviolent movements are neocon conspiracies. So if you want to bring about change without violence you’re a Bush drone? That only violent revolutionary acts are legitimate?
    You then posted a whole lot of links that to tell the truth didn’t seem to make any point either way about the validity of nonviolent movements. So I couldn’t figure for sure what you were really getting at.

  13. Well, Henry, in that post “Second, ‘nonviolent social change’ is in the core of neoconservative colored revoutions doctrine”, etc. you seemed to be implying that nonviolent movements are neocon conspiracies. So if you want to bring about change without violence you’re a Bush drone?
    OK, now I have something concrete to respond to 🙂
    My point is, both nonviolent and violent methods can be used to bring completely different kinds of social change, it all depends! So, IMO, whenever we have certain political movement, we can’t say that it is “good” simply because it is nonviolent.
    That only violent revolutionary acts are legitimate?
    I am sorry, but “legitimate revolutionary act” is contradiction in terms – like “flying pig”. What happens is that the purpose of any revolution is to change the notion of legitimacy, to illegitimize certain currently legitimate actions and vice versa.
    One example is Pinochet’s violent revolution in Chile outlawed the Chilean left.
    Another example is non-violent democratic counter-revolution which followed and relegitimzed the Chilean lefties and illegitimized Pinochet’s anti-leftist assault.

  14. oops… oops… ooops… oops…
    One example is Pinochet‘s violent revolution in Chile which outlawed the Chilean left. Another example is non-violent democratic counter-revolution that followed. It, in turn, relegitimzed the Chilean lefties and illegitimized Pinochet’s anti-leftist assault.
    IMO, the question of which of these two revolutions was “good” and which was “bad”, depends on ideological orientation, not just on the use of violence. Economy-wise, Pinochet’s reforms were rightist, but, as far as I know, they were nothing like disastrous.
    BTW, returning to MLK, I can’t say that I see any particular interest in economic impact of civil rights movement in the US 🙁

  15. I think people here WISH that the neoconservative movement really would use nonviolent means as their primary method of promoting their policies…
    Henry you seemed to be implying that the so called “colored revolutions” have no legitimacy as true popular uprisings against government injustice. I wouldn’t call the Pinochet coup a revolution; that was a military coup, not a popular uprising against Allende.

  16. I think people here WISH that the neoconservative movement really would use nonviolent means as their primary method of promoting their policies…
    Well, as far as I am concerned, I am doing my best to put all kinds of “wishes” aside and just desribe what is going on,
    Henry you seemed to be implying that the so called “colored revolutions” have no legitimacy as true popular uprisings against government injustice. I wouldn’t call the Pinochet coup a revolution; that was a military coup, not a popular uprising against Allende.
    Please, see above on legitimacy. Also, what I understand by revolution is any radical change of govenment – either violent or nonviolent. This way, I see Pinochet as a rightist revolutionary.

  17. One thing that the Robert E Lee eulogizers often fail to note is that at when he got old he told people that the biggest mistake of his life was going into the army as a career.
    Stonewall Jackson, on the other hand, was a ruthless, cruel, bloodthirsty man.

  18. Another point to remember about Lee is this well-documented story: one Sunday in June 1865, during services at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, when the time came for the communion a black man walked up to the table and knelt to recieve the bread and wine. The white minister and congregants were stunned and froze for several moments, until one church member stepped out of his pew and knelt beside the black man. It was, of course, Robert E. Lee.
    Now, it is historically inaccurate to say that Lee was anti-racist or opposed to slavery, and this story has been interpreted in several ways, but regardless of Lee’s actual views on race and slavery, this gesture is a powerful symbol of reconciliation that deserves remembrance.

  19. Honestly, I just can’t see how, in this day and age, anyone could consider MLK to be controversial or divisive. But I do realize there are some people who still haven’t gotten over losing the civil war.
    I find myself agreeing with Dominic here.

  20. Also, I believe that Lee treated “his own” slaves fairly well– didn’t he free them? This, in contrast to his predecessor in Virginia settler politics, Thomas Jefferson, who never could bring himself to take that crucial step despite all his great writings about human “freedom”. TJ is (generally) celebrated throughout the whole USA as an advocate of “freedom”, while Lee is not.
    Personally, I think that discourses of “freedom” here in the US are often deeply duplicitous… not least, of course, in the case of “Operation Iraqi Freedom”.

  21. Joshua, I agree that those few who still object to celebrating Dr. King’s life and work are, on the whole, not worth listening to. I just wanted to suggest that celebrating both King and Lee — not necessarily on the same day, mind you — is not quite as hypocritical as it might seem at first glance.
    As for “getting over” losing the Civil War, I think there’s a value in remembering that — not in the foolish ideal of the “lost cause” or in romanticizing the antebellum South, but in the knowledge of what it is like to be a defeated and occupied land. It’s exactly because of the South’s historical experience as “losers” that Robert E. Lee is worth remembering, especially with regard to his conduct after the war. Let’s not forget that one of the reasons Gen. Marshall was such a strong advocate of post-war rebuilding in Europe was his experience growing up in the impoverished South during Reconstruction and the following decades. Perhaps it’s idealistic of me to think this, but I feel that a nation which remembers what it is like to be defeated and occupied is a nation more likely to be cautious, respectful and humble about the prospect of occupying another country. I fear that American triumphalism (“we’re right because we’re Americans and Americans are winners”) has a powerful, negative influence both on our leaders’ willingness to go to war and on how our troops treat the citizens of Iraq and other countries.
    My own view of the Iraqi insurgency is strongly colored by a story my mother, a staunch Virginian and descendant of a Confederate Army doctor, once told me. I have no knowledge of its origins or accuracy, but it strikes me as true. According to the story, a Confederate soldier was captured and interrogated by Union officers, who quickly realized that he was a poor, ignorant Virginia farmboy who owned no slaves and had no understanding of the legal arguments for and against secession. One of the Union officers asked the soldier, “You don’t have a dog in this fight. Why are you fighting us?” The soldier looked blankly at his captors and replied, “Because you’re here.” The lesson I learned from this story is that the very act of occupation creates resentment and can legitimize a cause, a simple truth which was ignored or forgotten by the advocates and planners of the Iraq war, and which we have been forced to learn all over again.
    As for Robert E. Lee’s attitudes towards slavery, he did once say in an 1856 letter that slavery was “a moral and political evil”, and he did free slaves that he had inherited from his father-in-law — after renting their labor out for five years, to pay off his father-in-law’s debts. The evidence about his own views on slavery and African Americans is, typically, equivocal, and can be interpreted several ways depending on one’s own biases. There’s a decent account of the evidence at Lee’s Wikipedia entry.
    Helena is correct, though, that Lee appears less morally compromised on the issue of slavery than Jefferson. She is also correct that we Americans talk far too glibly about “freedom” and “liberation”…

  22. Mr. Rowe’s comments made me look at Southern history a way I never have before. It would be nice if the South’s memory of defeat tempered the Democratic Party’s plans for the occupation of Germany and Japan in 1945. I fear few Southerners shared Marshall’s wisdom, based on subsequent events at home. Check out Joe Bageant’s site, joebageant.com, for some extremely dark essays on Southerners’ outlook and how this aided Bush’s imperialism.

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