A Memorial Day Reflection

​The reflection entreated of us on Memorial Day is essentially historical: for what purposes has America fought? to what aims have her soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines given their sacred lives? We will have ample opportunity in the coming weeks and months to consider how those seemingly similar questions might generate very different responses. History is complicated and motivations do not always align. But today, this observation: 

Medgar Evers is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Evers, a WWII veteran, was shot and killed by white supremacists in his own driveway in 1963, returning from a meeting in his role as NAACP field secretary. Inside the house were his wife and three children, all of whom heard the gunshot that killed their husband and father.

The crime that took Evers’s life and the war in which he fought twenty years earlier were linked by a common fascist enemy. This linkage, between Nazi race superiority abroad and Jim Crow-segregation at home–the same fight to which Evers had dedicated his life–had been made in 1942 by James G. Thompson in a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier. In that letter, Thompson called for a “Double V” victory: “The first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for Victory over our enemies within” since “those who perpetrate . . . ugly prejudices here are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces.”

Evers and Thompson and a generation of Americans insisted that their sacrifices were about freedom for all, and about the democracy upon which any secure freedom must rest. Many continued to pay that price long after the guns of war went silent. Many continue to pay the price for freedom and democracy today.

#democracy
#freedom
#MemorialDay

Medgar Evers' widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, who at 90 years old remains vital and active. This was not that long ago.