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Retired Army Lt. Col. Barnard Kemter was midway through his speech at a Memorial Day ceremony in an Ohio cemetery when he started discussing the role that freed Black enslaved people played in an early event honoring Civil War dead.
Suddenly, his microphone cut off. Kemter, 77, tapped it a few times before yelling for assistance, video of the Monday event shows.
“I assumed it was a technical glitch,” Kemter, who carried on with his speech off-mic while he waited for the audio to return, told The Washington Post.
But the disruption was no glitch. One of the event’s organizers later admitted the audio had been deliberately turned down, telling the Akron Beacon Journal that Kemter’s discussion of Black history “was not relevant to our program for the day.”
“We asked him to modify his speech, and he chose not to do that,” Cindy Suchan, president of the Hudson American Legion Auxiliary, told the Beacon Journal.
Imagine fighting in the military for rights like free speech only to have your mic cut by some racist Karen because you dared to tell the truth about black people's contributions to the very holiday you're celebrating. And her statement is inaccurate, it's not just black history it's american history.
this white washing of history is part of multiple centuries of anti-black propaganda. Racism and the need for whites to feel like they are heroes for what they've done to other groups of people need to end. People don't even want to hear the truth. They want a fairy tale at the expense of black people.
And then on May 1, 1865, something even more extraordinary happened. According to two reports that Blight found in The New York Tribune and The Charleston Courier, a crowd of 10,000 people, mostly freed slaves with some white missionaries, staged a parade around the race track. Three thousand Black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and sang “John Brown’s Body.” Members of the famed 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments were in attendance and performed double-time marches. Black ministers recited verses from the Bible.
If the news reports are accurate, the 1865 gathering at the Charleston race track would be the earliest Memorial Day commemoration on record. Blight excitedly called the Avery Institute of Afro-American History and Culture at the College of Charleston, looking for more information on the historic event.
“‘I’ve never heard of it,’ they told me,” says Blight. “‘This never happened.’”
But it was clear from the newspaper reports that a Memorial Day observance was organized by freed slaves in Charleston at least a year before other U.S. cities and three years before the first national observance. How had been lost to history for over a century?
Imo, anyone who does not believe that free speech in the U.S. is becoming more and more of an endangered right has not been paying attention.
Whoever was responsible for the speech being cut off should be ashamed.
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