The Memory that Liberates
Reclaiming the Buried Truth of Memorial Day and the Battle for America’s Soul

There is a kind of forgetting that wounds, and a kind of remembering that liberates.
Memorial Day, for many, is the start of summer: barbecues, mattress sales, flags waving on the highway. It’s become a long weekend steeped in red, white, and blue, and a sentimental honoring of “all who served.” That’s the tradition I’ve grown up with, it’s the story that’s been handed down to me. In that context, I honor those in my family line who have served the armed forces of the United States. I have ancestors who have fought and died and served with dignity and returned home from gruesome battles. From the Revolutionary War, Civil War (with family members on both sides), both World Wars, Korean War, to Vietnam. It is right, good and honorable to pause, reflect and remember those who have served and sacrificed.
On this Memorial Day, let us extend our support to the families and communities of the fallen. Their grief is immeasurable, their loss irreplaceable. Let us also stand in solidarity with our veterans, many of whom bear physical and emotional scars long after the battles have ended. Our respect and gratitude for their service must translate into tangible support—accessible healthcare, mental health services, and robust reintegration programs. - Desireé B Stephens
Yet most of this honoring and remembering has been replaced with platitudes, burgers and discounted mattresses.
But if we trace the day to its roots, to its origin, we will discover a powerful story. One that has been buried, overwritten, and—like so many elements of our history in this country—colonized.
“There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.”
— Zora Neale Hurston
The first widely documented Memorial Day took place on May 1, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, organized not by a government nor a military, but by formerly enslaved Black Americans(1). After the Confederacy evacuated the city, Union soldiers discovered a mass grave at a former horse track where more than 260 Black Union prisoners of war had been buried without honor. In an act of sacred restoration, the Black community exhumed the bodies, gave them proper burials (dug individual graves for each body), and then staged a massive procession, 10,000 strong….of choirs, children, preachers, and Union troops. They sang spirituals. They laid flowers. They remembered not just with reverence, but with purpose.
With their hearts they remembered. Remembered their ancestors who gave their lives for the emancipation from slavery that they now had. With their actions they restored. Restored the dignity of their ancestors sacrifice, courage and their honor.
This was not a generic patriotic moment. It was a deliberate and specific act of dignity, justice, and most of all, truth-telling. It said: These men died for our liberation—and we will not let them be forgotten.
But what began as an expression of Black gratitude and sacred reclamation was soon absorbed by white-led narratives. The day was renamed, redefined, and stripped of its origin story. The focus shifted from remembering the cause of freedom to honoring all military service, regardless of the side. And eventually, as capitalism does, it turned grief into marketing. Today, Memorial Day is more associated with 30% off sales than with 19th-century acts of spiritual and moral resistance.
This trajectory from liberation to generalization to commodification, is not just the story of this holiday, it’s the story of American culture itself.
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
— Malcolm X
How often do we see this pattern? Black innovation becomes pop culture. Indigenous rituals become festival aesthetics. Grassroots movements get sanitized into slogans. Truth gets replaced with “both sides.” Justice is watered down into decorum. And memory, the kind of memory that liberates, is replaced by myth.
“Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero.”
— African Proverb
But here’s the thing: we can’t heal what we won’t remember. And we can’t be free while living inside someone else’s version of the truth.
This Memorial Day, I want to invite you into a deeper kind of remembrance. One that refuses to skip over the hard parts. One that knows that healing begins with naming what was stolen, what was hidden, what was rewritten. True liberation, personal, cultural, spiritual, starts with restoring what was buried.
“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”
— Angela Davis
The 1865 Memorial Day procession in Charleston wasn’t just about the dead. It was about reclaiming the sacredness of every life, and the truth of what that life was given for. That truth still speaks. It calls us to remember not only with our heads, but with our lives.
Because to remember rightly is to begin again.
The Battle Continues
The erasure of history is not passive. It is power in action.
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
— Milan Kundera
When we forget, or worse, when we allow history to be rewritten, erased, and dismissed - we invite the very forces our ancestors once defeated to rise again.
Let me make it plain for us: The emancipated Black community in Charleston exhumed the bodies of their ancestors and gave them honor as an act of definite resolution. Their message was clear and eternal:
“We will not let history, nor this country in which we live, forget that the social evils of racism, discrimination, and oppression tried to bury us—but we defeated them.”
And yet today, those very forces are marching again. They march masked in matching khakis and baseball caps in Kansas City, and they march in suits and red hats through the halls of congress and the oval office.
The end of the Civil War put a clear line in the sand of American history, or at least it was supposed to. It said, from this day forward we are committed to a multi-cultural and diverse nation, living under the banner of liberty and justice for all. Yet the brief period of Reconstruction was followed by Jim Crow. 100 years later the victory of the civil rights act was followed by the Heritage Foundation and a new southern strategy in policy and politics. Todays iteration is MAGA and Trump and the attacks continue:
Attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts
Book bans targeting Black, queer, and truth-telling authors
Anti-woke legislation designed to silence history and soften systemic critique
The dismantling of public education and the criminalization of truth in our classrooms
“The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” - Toni Morrison
These are not isolated policy changes. They are coordinated attempts to bury the truth again, to shove memory back into the grave, and let false narratives raise the flag of a whitewashed moral order. You can track it all right here: Project 2025 Tracker
Beloveds, we cannot afford to be sentimental when we are called to be prophetic. Memorial Day is not just a time to remember—it is a time to reclaim. Not just to honor sacrifice, but to continue the struggle. Because the moment we stop fighting for the integrity of our memory is the moment we allow injustice to be reborn.
“We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.”
— James Baldwin, “Nobody Knows My Name”
Reflection:
What stories in your own life, culture, or faith have been sanitized or repackaged? What would it mean to reclaim them?
How might your remembrance become a form of resistance?
Rev. David Alexander D.D. is the spiritual director of the of Spiritual Living Center of Atlanta, author of Freedom from Discord: The Promise of New Thought Liberation Theology and Recovery from the Lie of Whiteness. David writes a monthly column, Philosophy In Action in Science of Mind Magazine.
References and sources
1. Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001).
2. https://www.yahoo.com/news/masked-patriot-front-white-nationalists-143033821.html
3. Desireé B Stephens - Liberation Education - one of my all time favorite substack educators and contributors!
Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard – Essays and speeches on race, memory, and art.
Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
The African American Policy Forum - provides valuable resources on book bans, critical race theory, and the anti-DEI movement.