Memorial Day: Ghosts of Confederacy in Brooklyn

(Editorial Note)

On Memorial Day, Green-Wood Cemetery officials in Brooklyn hosted a day of remembrance for both sides in the Civil War. This event was part of a weeks-long propaganda campaign to glorify the pro-slavery forces by enshrining their supposed noble “sacrifice.” This gross, racist provocation should repulse any decent anti-racist fighter, anyone who takes up the cause of the working class.

During the Civil War—which the Daily News (29 May) referred to as “divisive”—New York City was a hotbed of pro-secessionist sentiment. This was mainly driven by the material interests of merchants who were an indispensable link in the chain of circulation of the goods and services wrenched from the blood, sweat and tears of black slaves. In the Civil War, the last great bourgeois-democratic revolution, the Northern bourgeoisie as a whole, in following its own class interests, abolished chattel slavery and destroyed the old Southern plantation agricultural system. After the war, the Northern capitalists betrayed the promise of black freedom and formed an alliance with the remnants of the slavocracy in order to exploit Southern resources and the freedmen.

We will not forgive, nor will we forget. While Memorial Day today celebrates bloody U.S. imperialism, we point to the first Memorial Day (then known as Decoration Day), initiated by emancipated blacks in honor of the Union dead. On 1 May 1865, in liberated Charleston, South Carolina, nearly 10,000 former slaves marched on the grounds of the old Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, prewar bastion of the planter elite. During the war, the racecourse was turned into a hellish prison camp, where hundreds of Union soldiers died of disease and were buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. After black workmen buried the dead properly on the grounds, 3,000 black schoolchildren marched past the graves, softly singing “John Brown’s Body” and laying flowers. Several Union regiments joined the march, including the 104th and 35th Colored regiments, as well as the famous 54th Massachusetts, commemorated in the movie Glory.

The Civil War will be finished when there is a socialist America, the only way to achieve black liberation. To hell with the “national reconciliation” pushed by the capitalist press, right-wing and “liberal” alike. We stand for implacable class struggle to smash the racist capitalist system and the rule of the bloody imperialist oppressors, who from Baghdad to Kabul to Brooklyn are daily, and increasingly, tightening the chains on the oppressed and exploited.