by Rosemary Kean
The militarization and lethal force of police departments continues since the police murder of George Floyd on Memorial Day weekend in 2020, which dramatized this situation across the country and around the world. Police killed more than 1,300 people in the U.S. last year, making 2024 the deadliest year for police violence since Mapping Police Violence began tracking civilian deaths over 10 years ago.
The fact that Floyd’s death occurred on Memorial Day weekend brings together the issues of the death tolls of both war and police violence – the U.S. war at home and the wars abroad.
In their article on Memorial Day published in countercurrents.org last week, Michael McPhearson and Gerry Condon of Veterans for Peace highlight that militarism has been injected into two US holidays meant to focus on war veterans- Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day. They write, “Veterans For Peace chooses to honor ALL who have died in wars, both combatants and civilians. Our hope is that a sober accounting of the casualties of war will mitigate against the tendency to turn Memorial Day – like Veterans Day – into a patriotic celebration of U.S. militarism.”
NNOMY, the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth, works on counter-recruitment in high schools and raises concern about how militarism has infected so many aspects of life in the United States. And Joan Roelofs, in her book The Trillion Dollar Silencer: Why There Is So Little Anti-War Protest in the United States, connects the dots between the largess of our Pentagon budget and the silence of so many sectors of our society about the danger we face from those invested in war and death.
We who do protest war are well acquainted with the U.S. State Department’s ideology of world domination through war, proxy wars, and economic manipulation of perceived rivals. The wealth of our country is spent on these nefarious endeavors, so much so that the values of democracy, investing in the health and welfare of our citizens, respect for sovereignty, and international cooperation to protect and restore the climate are thoroughly undermined today. The genocide in Gaza and the carnage in Ukraine that our tax dollars make possible provide excruciating evidence of this perversion of ideals and morality.
Clint Smith in his book How the Word Is Passed describes the first recorded effort to memorialize Union soldiers after the end of the Civil War in 1865. This event was carried out primarily by Black freed men and women in Charleston, South Carolina, in May of that year and was recorded in The New York Tribune and the local Charleston Daily Courier. It included a procession of ten thousand, mostly Black people, including Union infantrymen, and a choir of two to three thousand children who sang, among other pieces, the Union marching song John Brown’s Body, as well as spirituals.
Such an occasion as this must have been! But, was it remembered in our Memorial Day celebrations this year? Were we reminded that Memorial Day was a holiday that began after the Civil War when every family in the country had been personally touched by the death and destruction of the Civil War? Were we reminded that slavery was ended by this war, only to be followed by a reconstruction period that ended with a resurgence of racist government policies and Ku Klux Klan terrorism?
The current increase in racist attacks on democracy, human rights, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights by our government reminds us that the struggle for civil-rights, women’s, gender, indigenous, disability, and union rights is not only far from over, but hangs in the balance today. Let Memorial Day be a time when we remember the courage of those who have given their lives to the movements for peace and liberation, as well as memorializing unnumbered veterans and civilians who have died because of U.S. traditions of violence and militarism.
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Rosemary Kean is a member of MAPA’s Board of Directors and a co-convener of the Racial Justice Working Group
