Tentative Tour Schedule: The Wild Crazy Ride of the Marvin X Experience

 Marvin X  National  Tour 2016

East Coast/West Coast/Dirty South

Marvin X is the author of 30 books, including poetry, essays, autobiography, memoir. He has taught at Fresno State University, University of California, Berkeley and San Diego, San Francisco State University, Mills College, University of Nevada, Reno, Laney College, Merritt College. He received writing fellowships from Columbia University (via Harlem Cultural Council) and the National Endowment for the Arts; planning grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, via the Nevada Cultural Council. His archives were acquired by the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Most recently, Marvin helped the City of Oakland create the Black Arts Movement Business District along the 14th Street corridor, downtown.

He has two forthcoming books: Sweet Tea/Dirty Rice, New and Selected Poems, 2016, and Notes of an Artistic Freedom Fighter: Essays, Letters, 2016, Black Bird Press, Berkeley CA.

 His writings appear in Ishmael Reed's The Complete Muhammad Ali

 His poetry appears in Black Gold Poetry Anthology

 This is his 13 Step manual to recover from the addiction to white supremacy
foreword by Dr. Nathan Hare

 Writers at memorial for Jayne Cortez and Amiri Baraka, New York University

 Marvin X Fan Club

 The Black Arts Movement Poets Choir and Arkestra, University of California, Merced, 2014

 Marvin X participated in the Sun Ra Conference, University of Chicago, 2015

Marvin X and Sun Ra worked together in Harlem, 1968, at UC Berkeley, 1971-72. During this time, Sun Ra arranged the musical version of Flowers for the Trashman, retitled Take Care of Business, produced at Marvin's Black Educational Theatre, San Francisco, 1972

 Marvin and Oakland CA Mayor Libby Schaaf, a supporter of the Black Arts Movement

 Marvin X in conversation with Amiri Baraka, Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, New Mexico

 His writings appear in the BAM Reader, also in the BAM Classic Black Fire

f

 Marvin X appeared in Stanley Nelson's film

Director Stanley Nelson, Marvin X, Fred Hampton, Jr.

"Marvelous Marvin X!"--Dr. Cornel West

Marvin X and daughter Nefertiti at Laney College BAM 50th Celebration. In this inter-generational 

panel discussion, she urged her father to pass the baton!

Panel Discussion: Women and the Black Arts Movement, Laney College BAM 50th Celebration, 2014. Left to Right: Elaine Brown, Dr. Halifu Osumare, Judy Juanita, Portia Anderson, Kujichagulia, Aries Jordan. Marvin X, producer.

TENTATIVE TOUR SCHEDULE

February 24, Black History, Oakland City Hall

 

 Marvin X and Oakland City Council President, Lynette McElhaney
Oakland City Hall Black History Celebration
photo Adam Turner

April 23, Memorial for Hugo "Yogi" Panell, San Quentin Six member, African American Cultural Center, San Francisco. Marvin X spoke and read.

 

Hugo "Yogi" Panell, San Quentin Six

May 15, 2016  New York City reading of contributors to anthology,  Black Hollywood unchained, edited by Ishmael Reed, Third World Press, Chicago.

A scene from Marvin X's BAM classic Flowers for the Trashman, produced by Kim McMillon's theatre students at University of California, Merced. 

Students and Marvin X in Kim McMillon's class on theatre and social activism. "My students love Marvin X!" says Professor McMillon.

May 25, University of California, Merced, Marvin X speaks in Professor Kim McMillon's theatre class on his role in the Black Arts Movement as artistic freedom fighter and playwright, author of the BAM classic Flowers for the Trashman. 

May 29, Marvin X celebrates his 72nd birthday. Travels to outter space.

June 18, San Francisco Juneteenth, in the Fillmore. Marvin X and Fillmore Slim will perform "What is Love?" a poem by Marvin. At rehearsal, Fillmore answered, "Love is the Blues!" He will accompany Marvin on acoustic guitar.

Marvin X and Fillmore Slim

June 19, Berkeley Juneteenth, Marvin X autographs books, exhibits archives of the Black Arts Movement. 

Berkeley Juneteenth Festival, Sunday, June 19, 2016

 

 James Sweeney (left) and Marvin X at last year's festival. Marvin will autograph books and display his archives of the Black Arts Movement at this years event.

photo Harrison Chastan 

June 25, (West Oakland Juneteenth) 

July 3, San Francisco Public Library, reading of Black Hollywood unChained contributors 

 

July 23, Oakland Black Expo, Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza

September, 9-11 Black Arts Movement South 51st Anniversary Celebration, Dillard University, New Orleans, LA

 Marvin X in previous appearance at University of Houston TX

September, University of Houston, Texas, Africana Studies, Texas Southern University and elsewhere in the Big H. TBA

September, Black Arts Movement Theatre Festival, Flight Deck Theatre, Oakland
TBA

The Black Arts Movement Business District 

presents

BAM THEATRE FESTIVAL

Flight Deck Theatre

September 2016

The plays 

The Toilet by Amiri Baraka

Flowers for the Trashman by Marvin X

A scene from Marvin X's BAM classic Flowers for the Trashman, produced by Kim McMillon's theatre students at University of California, Merced. 

 Bathroom Graffiti Queen
by Opal Palmer Adisa

produced by 

Dr. Ayodele Nzinga

The Lower Bottom Playaz

September, Black Book Store, Seattle Wa, hosted by Hakim, TBA

August 1, September 30, Laney College Theatre, Oakland, Marvin X opens for Donald Lacy's Color Struck.

October, 20-23 Black Panther Party 50th Anniversary at Oakland Museum of California. Marvin X speaks/reads.

 

*   *   *   *   *

 

Marvin X, poet, playwright, essayist, producer, director, actor, organizer, educator

photo Pendarvis Harshaw

Invite Marvin X for Black History Month or Anytime.  He's living Black History!

Invite Marvin X!
He's living Black History!

He’s the new Malcolm X! Nobody’s going to talk about his book, HOW TO RECOVER FROM THE ADDICTION TO WHITE SUPREMACY, out loud, but they’ll hush hush about it.—Jerri Lange, author, Jerri, A Black Woman’s Life in the Media

He is a Master Teacher in many fields of thought—religion and psychology, sociology and anthropology, history and politics, literature and the humanities. He is a needed Counselor, for he knows himself, on the deepest of personal levels and he reveals that self to us, that we might be his beneficiaries…. If you want to reshape (clean up, raise) your consciousness, this is a book to savor, to read again and again—to pass onto a friend or lover.
—Rudolph Lewis, Editor, ChickenBones: A Journal
….Malcolm X ain’t got nothing on Marvin X. Still Marvin has been ignored and silenced like Malcolm would be ignored and silenced if he had lived on into the Now. Marvin’s one of the most extraordinary, exciting black intellectuals living today—writing, publishing, performing with Sun Ra’s Musicians (Live in Philly at Warm Daddies, available on DVD from BPP), reciting, filming, producing conferences (Kings and Queens of Black Consciousness, 2001,San Francisco Black Radical Book Fair, 2004); he’s ever engaging, challenging the respectable and the comfortable. He like Malcolm, dares to say things fearlessly, in the open (in earshot of the white man) that so many Negroes feel, think and speak on the corner, in the barbershops and urban streets of black America….
—Rudolph Lewis, Editor, ChickenBones: A Journal



…People who know Marvin X already know him as a peripatetic, outspoken, irreverent, poetic “crazy nigger,” whose pen is continually and forever out-of-control. As a professional psychologist, I hasten to invoke the disclaimer that that is in no way a diagnosis or clinical impression of mine. I have never actually subjected this brother to serious psychoanalytical scrutiny and have no wish to place him on the couch, if only because I know of no existing psycho-diagnostic instrumentality of pathology of normalcy that could properly evaluate Marvin completely.
—Dr. Nathan Hare, Black Think Tank, San Francisco

Marvin X has been a witness to history. He shows that an excellent minority writer can raise issues that the mainstream publishers and book reviewers find hard to grapple with…. He, Huey P. Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and others were also casualties of the chemical attack on African Americans in the form of Crack and alcohol waged by corporations and a government that placed questionable foreign policy goals above the health of its citizens…. Many of those who inspired the cultural revolution of the 1960s remain stuck there. This volume shows that Marvin X has moved on.
—Ishmael Reed, novelist, poet, essayist, publisher, Oakland


Iraq…how did we get there and how do we get back? The consciousness-altering book of poems that tells the tale, in no uncertain terms and yet always via poetry, is the astonishing Land of My Daughters: Poems 1995-2005 by Marvin X. Marvin X is the USA’s Rumi, and his nation is not “where our fathers died” but where our daughters live. The death of patriarchal war culture is his everyday reality. X’s poems vibrate, whip, love in the most meta- and physical ways imaginable and un-. He’s got the humor of Pietri, the politics of Baraka, and the spiritual Muslim grounding that is totally new in English—the ecstasy of Hafiz, the wisdom of Saadi. It’s not unusual for him to have a sequence of shortish lines followed by a culminating line that stretches a quarter page—it is the dance of the dervishes, the rhythms of a Qasida.
—Bob Holman, Bowery Poetry Club, New York City

To book Marvin X: jmarvinx@yahoo.com
510-200-4164

Dead Prez - Wolves

Memorial Day poem by Marvin X

Memorial Day, 2007

I am a veteran
Not of foreign battlefields
Like my father in world war one
My uncles in world war two
And Korea
Or my friends from Vietnam
And even the Congo “police action”
But veteran none the less
Exiled and jailed because I refused
To visit Vietnam as a running dog for imperialism
So I visited Canada, Mexico and Belize
Then Federal prison for a minute
But veteran I am of the war in the hood
The war of domestic colonialism and neo-colonialism
White supremacy in black face war
Fighting for black power that turned white
Or was always white as in the other white people
So war it was and is
Every day without end no RR no respite just war
For colors like kindergarten children war
For turf warriors don’t own and run when popo comes
War for drugs and guns and women
War for hatred jealousy
Dante got a scholarship but couldn’t get on the plane
The boyz in the hood met him on the block and jacked him
Relieved him of his gear shot him in the head because he could read
Play basketball had all the pretty girls a square
The boyz wanted him dead like themselves
Wanted him to have a shrine with liquor bottles and teddy bears
And candles
Wanted his mama and daddy to weep and mourn at the funeral
Like all the other moms and dads and uncle aunts cousins
Why should he make it out the war zone
The blood and broken bones of war in the hood
No veterans day no benefits no mental health sessions
No conversation who cares who wants to know about the dead
In the hood
the warriors gone down in the ghetto night
We heard the Uzi at 3am and saw the body on the steps until 3 pm
When the coroner finally arrived as children passed from school

I am the veteran of ghetto wars of liberation that were aborted
And morphed into wars of self destruction
With drugs supplied from police vans
Guns diverted from the army base and sold 24/7 behind the Arab store.
Junior is 14 but the main arms merchant in the hood
He sells guns from his backpack
His daddy wants to know how he get all them guns
But Junior don’t tell cause he warrior
He’s lost more friends than I the elder
What can I tell him about death and blood and bones
He says he will get rich or die trying
But life is for love not money
And if he lives he will learn.
If he makes it out the war zone to another world
Where they murder in suits and suites
And golf courses and yachts
if he makes it even beyond this world
He will learn that love is better than money
For he was once on the auction block and sold as a thing
For money, yes, for the love of money but not for love
And so his memory is short and absent of truth
The war in the hood has tricked him into the slave past
Like a programmed monkey he acts out the slave auction
The sale of himself on the corner with his homeys
Trying to pose cool in the war zone
I will tell him the truth and maybe one day it will hit him like a bullet
In the head
It will hit him multiple times in the brain until he awakens to the real battle
In the turf of his mind.
And he will stand tall and deliver himself to the altar of truth to be a witness
Along with his homeys
They will take charge of their posts
They will indeed claim their turf and it will be theirs forever
Not for a moment in the night
But in the day and in the tomorrows
And the war will be over
No more sorrow no more blood and bones
No more shrines on the corner with liquor bottles teddy bears and candles.
--Marvin X
25 May 2007
Brooklyn NY

Today's UCLA shooting: Deja Vu, 1969, two Black Panther Party leaders slain at UCLA

As soon as we heard the news about two killed at UCLA, we flashed back to the 1969 murder of Black Panther Party members Alprintice Bunchy Carter and John Huggins in the Black Student Union meeting room. The latest twin killing appears to be a murder suicide, not similar to the killing of BPP leaders Bunchy and Huggins, supposedly in a power struggle over the BSU between the BPP and the US organization headed by Ron Karenga, labeled as a "cultural nationalist" by the BPP. FYI, the BPP called all those who did not believe in armed revolution as cultural nationalists. We know the US organization (socalled founders of Kwanza but we learned Kwanza originated in Oakland with the Afro-American Association, of which Ron Karenga was the Los Angeles representative) was connected with COINTELPRO (the US Government's counter intelligence program to prevent Black Liberation, including the rise of a Black Messiah, Hoover). Geronimo Ja Jigga who assumed leadership of the Black Panther Party upon the death of Bunchy, put the blame squarely on the police rather than the US organization, although the Steiner brothers were members of US and were charged and convicted of the twin murder.

Geronimo served 27 years in prison after COINTELPRO framed him for a murder he didn't commit since he was in Oakland at a Black Panther Party central committee meeting, taped by the FBI but when the BPP split between Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, the Oakland BPP would not testify for Geronimo because he was part of the Eldridge Cleaver faction. And of course the FBI would not disclose their recordings that revealed Geronimo was in Oakland.


His years in prison, humbled Geronimo to the extent when Ron "Maulana" Karenga arrived in San Quentin Prison for terrorizing Black women, i.e., forcing a water hose down their throats because he suspected they were snitches, he told the brothers who wanted to take out Karenga to give him a pass and they did.

Ironically or strangely, the Steiner brothers went to prison and served time in the same cell, then mysteriously escaped to reappear in French Guyana, South America. After years in exile, one brother turned himself in and was sent back to America to serve time although it was longer than he thought he had agreed to with the authorities. Nevertheless, he was released from San Quentin to Oakland, headquarters of the BPP, but he told people he was not afraid to be in the turf of the BPP. He had it together, yes, even though he will be present during the 50th anniversary of the BPP. Furthermore, he has done reconciliation with the widow of John Huggins, Ericka Huggins, so in his mind, everything is cool.

Since seeing Straight Outta Compton, I am reminded of the scene when the rappers who crossed each other, but soon after get in each others face like nothing has happened. This seems to be the nature of a certain kind of rat who will fuck over you then come around as though he's done nothing to you and want to continue business as usual. How do we categorize such rats: sewer rats, church rats, house rats, wharf rats or subway rats? And how do you include such rats in a United Front?

Parable of the Rats by Marvin X

The rats all have the same gait: they scurry about, back broken by an abundance of lies, half-truths and disinformation, defamation and other tactics of rat behavior. Even their facial expressions have a rat like appearance, so you can see them coming a mile away. You can smell a funky rat. We suspect the two legged variety even has a tail hidden inside their pants or underneath their dresses, yes, there are rats of every gender, every color, class. Some are sewer rats, some are wharf rats, some are subway rats, church rats, house rats. But their behavior is the same. They are on the lower level of humankind, these two legged rats. They can do nothing right. They cannot give justice even with the scale in view while they weigh goods. They will lie while you look at them playing with the scale. They will try to convince you the scale doesn't work while it is their minds that have not evolved to work on the human level.

There is only one thing to do with such rats: set a trap for them or feed them poison cheese and watch them puke and vomit until they die. Better yet, let the cat catch their asses. It is beautiful watching the cat catch a rat, seeing how still the cat will become while stalking his prey. But the cat will lie in wait for the rat as long as it takes, never moving, never batting his eye. And then he leaps upon his prey and devours him. It is a beautiful sight when when the cat and rat game reaches the climax and ends with the consumption of the rat by the cat.
--Marvin X
7/15/15

 The first time I met Eldridge and Bunchy was when the staff of Black Dialogue Magazine, who were mostly students in the BSU at San Francisco State College, now University, were invited to make a presentation to the Soledad Prison Black Cultural Club, 1966, which was in fact the foundation of the American Prison Movement. I observed the club was a military organization within the prison. Prison griot (historian) Kumasi said, "You guys had your revolution on the outside, we had our revolution on the inside! It was kill or be killed!"

Marvin X, Fresno State College/University lecturer in Black Studies, 1969

I write this narrative because during this time I was fighting to teach in the Black Studies Department at Fresno State University. Governor Ronald Reagan told the State College Board of Trustees, of which he was president as governor, "Get Marvin X off campus by any means necessary."

My mother was a real estate broker in Fresno so when I didn't have classes at FSU, I would answer the phone at her office, A lady called and when I answered the phone, she said, "Is this Marvin X? Boy, you still out there fightin' dem white people? You ain't dead yet?"

No, I wasn't dead yet, and even the Black police said, "Marvin X, while you were fighting to teach at Fresno State College, you made things better for everybody, including us Black police. Before you came to FSU, we couldn't patrol the white side of town!"

But my most traumatic experience was my speaking tour of Los Angeles, sponsored by students who called themselves the United Students of California. They drove up to Fresno and San Francisco to support my court case in Fresno--I was issued a court restraining order to not enter the FSU campus.
The Los Angeles students took me on a tour of L.A., including the BPP office where they had the shootout with the L.A. pigs, blood still on the walls; then they took me to the UCLA BSU meeting room where Bunchy and John were killed, blood still on the walls!!!!! I wish somebody would help me!

 To the left of Bunchy is Ron Karenga, leader of US, the suspected killer of Bunchy. Well, two members of the US organization were convicted, the Steiner brothers.

Alprintice Bunchy Carter, the most handsome Black man in the Black Liberation Movement and one of our greatest warriors, including John Huggins!

The Black American origin of Memorial Day

Time Periods: Civil War Era: 1850 - 1864, 19th Century | Themes: Wars & Related Anti-War Movements | Reading Levels: Adult, High School

The First Decoration Day

The people’s history of Memorial Day.

Memorial Day, originally published in the New York Times. Used here with permission of the artist Owen Freeman.

By David W. Blight.

2011. http://zinnedproject.org

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 we 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.

1865 view of the Union soldiers graves at Washington Racecourse. Library of Congress.

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 a.m. 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, funeral 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.

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Blight is the author of "American Oracle" and many other books.

Related Resources

Full chapter on Memorial Day origins.

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David W. Blight (Harvard University Press, 2002) offers a full chapter on the history of Memorial Day. Here is the publisher’s description of the book, which also helps to explain why the Memorial Day story shared in this article has been hidden from public memory: “No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America’s collective memory as the Civil War. In the war’s aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America’s national reunion. 

In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation. The ensuing decades witnessed the triumph of a culture of reunion, which downplayed sectional division and emphasized the heroics of a battle between noble men of the Blue and the Gray. Nearly lost in national culture were the moral crusades over slavery that ignited the war, the presence and participation of African Americans throughout the war, and the promise of emancipation that emerged from the war.  

Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers’ reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial.” Read more here.

“Forgetting Why We Remember” by David W. Blight, New York Times, May 29, 2011.

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 David W. Blight is professor of American history at Yale University and director of the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. Blight has won major historical awards, including the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize. He is the author of manybooks on U.S. history.
Posted at the Zinn Education Project website with permission of the author fromThe First Decoration Day.