My thoughts started to coalesce from a thread on TalkLeft titled “Politics Has Always Been Stupid which brings up an NYT Op-Ed piece by Bob Herbert titled “Overkill and Short Shrift. This article laments the media play of Jeremiah Wright as a diversion to discussing the real issues of this political season.

It’s not accidental that the discussions of race have been systematically dismissed from this campaign. From the very start, Obama has been the first black candidate to nationally campaign with the premise that no where in his agenda is there a desire to hold white Americans accountable for the past.  Read more 

The standard accepted “ending date” for the Civil War is April 9, 1865, the day the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered to Grant at Appomattox.

It didn’t end there, of course. The immediate postwar period had the chaos that follows all such massive conflict and major change; such periods are imbued with even more of the “we’re making this up as we go along” quality as all of history does. Decisions made in such times can set the course of all time to come.

I’m going to bet you’ve never heard of this very early, if not indeed the first, Memorial Day service, because I hadn’t and I follow such things fairly closely. The excellent Kevin Levin, recounts the scene as told by David Blight, perhaps the premier scholar of the early Reconstruction period working today:

After Charleston, South Carolina was evacuated in February 1865 near the end of the Civil War, most of the people remaining among the ruins of the city were thousands of blacks. During the final eight months of the war, Charleston had been bombarded by Union batteries and gunboats, and much of its magnificent architecture lay in ruin. Also during the final months of war the Confederates had converted the Planters’ Race Course (a horse track) into a prison in which some 257 Union soldiers had died and were thrown into a mass grave behind the grandstand.

In April, more than twenty black carpenters and laborers went to the gravesite, reinterred the bodies in proper graves, built a tall fence around the cemetery enclosure one hundred yards long, and built an archway over an entrance. On the archway they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.” And with great organization, on May 1, 1865, the black folk of Charleston, in cooperation with white missionaries, teachers, and Union troops, conducted an extraordinary parade of approximately ten thousand people.  Read more