Black Twitter honors veterans
“We do so much in this country to celebrate and honor folks who risk their lives on the battlefield,” Bryan Stevenson, head of the Equal Justice initiative, told the New Yorker in 2016. “But we don’t remember that Black veterans were more likely to be attacked for their service than honored for it.”
Sunday marked a celebration of service men and women on Veterans Day, the day those of us around the United States honor our vets across all branches of the military.
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The occasion was not lost on social media users, who seized the moment to memorialize veterans in their lives. Here are some tweets:
As we mark the Armistice of the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" that ended WWI 100 years ago today, I remember my great grandfather, Horatio Dickerson, who served in the all-black 369th Infantry Regiment known as the Harlem Hellfighters. #VeteransDay pic.twitter.com/fLtb6P0Sfy
— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) November 11, 2018
The National Association for Black Veterans held a Veteran’s Day Memorial service during a chilly Friday morning at Cove Haven Cemetery in Lexington. Over 500 veterans are buried in the cemetery including veterans from the United States Colored Civil War Troops. @heraldleader pic.twitter.com/ry6H2BkcLO
— Charles Bertram (@cbertramHL) November 9, 2018
In honor of our Black Southern Belle veterans. https://t.co/ObXka1wMGQ pic.twitter.com/zdWeVPc54s
— Black Southern Belle (@blksouthbelle) November 12, 2018
However, along with honoring our Black Veterans, people are also taking time to talk about the forgotten the unique struggles they faced, including tyranny abroad and Jim Crow at home.
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“We do so much in this country to celebrate and honor folks who risk their lives on the battlefield,” Bryan Stevenson, head of the Equal Justice initiative, told the New Yorker in 2016. “But we don’t remember that Black veterans were more likely to be attacked for their service than honored for it.”
The EJI put out a groundbreaking study that year on how Black Vets were treated upon their return from foreign wars such as the two World Wars and the Korean War and it included harrowing stories of the viciousness with which men and women who fought for this country were then treated like second-class citizens within their military ranks and back home.
“In Congress, the fear that returning soldiers posed a threat to racial hierarchy in the South was a matter of public record” an excerpt from the report says. “On August 16, 1917, Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, speaking on the Senate floor, warned that the reintroduction of Black servicemen to the South would ‘inevitably lead to disaster.’
“For Senator Vardaman and others like him, Black soldiers’ patriotism was a threat, not a virtue,” it continues. “Impress the negro with the fact that he is defending the flag, inflate his untutored soul with military airs, teach him that it is his duty to keep the emblem of the Nation flying triumphantly in the air, it is but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.”
The report sheds light on the evolution of Black military members and their fight for equality and respect from the Civil War, to the aftermath of the end of Reconstruction following the 1876 election of Rutherford B. Hayes, to Jim Crow.
It also helps people realize that there is much more to Veterans Day for Black veterans.
“African Americans served in the Civil War, World War I, and World War II for the ideals of freedom, justice, and democracy, only to return to racial terror and violence,” the study concludes. “American individuals and institutions intent on maintaining white supremacy and racial hierarchy targeted black veterans for discrimination, subordination, violence, and lynching because they represented the hope and possibility of black empowerment and social equality.
“That hope threatened to disrupt entrenched social, economic, and political forces, and to inspire larger segments of the black community to participate in activism that could deal a serious blow to the system of segregation and oppression that had reigned for nearly a century and was rooted in a myth of racial difference older than the nation itself.”