Let's give Confederate Memorial Day a makeover

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April 26, 2008

By Steve Gillespie / managing editor The Meridian Star Sat Apr 26, 2008, 11:21 PM CDT

And what does your family have planned for Confederate Memorial Day?

It's tomorrow, you know. Sometimes it sneaks up on us.

Don't forget we'll have just regular old Memorial Day next month for all the rest of the wars Americans died in, but tomorrow is JUST Confederate Memorial Day because even though those Southern boys were Americans, too, our state wants them to have their own separate Memorial Day. We wouldn't want to honor them with all that other riffraff.

Did you know that on the first official Memorial Day, May 30, 1868, the federal government had the nerve to have flowers placed on the graves of both the Union and Confederate dead in Arlington National Cemetery? Most of the Confederate states seceded from that Memorial Day and started having their own Confederate Memorial Days.

I was deprived of this holiday growing up in Arkansas, a Confederate state that doesn't have a Confederate Memorial Day. We're so stupid we honored our Confederate dead the same as all our other relatives who died in wars. But, once I came to Mississippi it was explained to me that Confederate Memorial Day is really just about honoring Southern heritage. I can understand that. Fortunately we have 10 other good months in the year so we can honor the heritage of all the other Americans whose ancestors went to war with the United States: Native American Memorial Day; British Memorial Day; Mexican Memorial Day; Spanish Memorial Day; German Memorial Day; Japanese Memorial Day; Korean Memorial Day; Vietnamese Memorial Day; Afghanistani Memorial Day; and Iraqi Memorial Day (we might want to wait until the current wars are over before we add them). Still, it makes me sad to think of all the cool stuff about the South we ignore on Confederate Memorial Day. There's just so much more to Southern heritage than that war, you know?

Why don't we ask our legislators if they could keep the last Monday in April as a state holiday, only call it ... oh, I don't know ... Southern Heritage Day maybe? That way even black southerners could feel just a little more included in celebrating their southern heritage. People who may have had many generations of their family living in the South only since the Civil War could celebrate their Southern heritage. Other Southerners who didn't have family in the Civil War could celebrate their Southern heritage, too. Why, even all the new people we're always trying to get to move down here and bring new jobs with them, would have a holiday to celebrate their new-found heritage. And, here's a thought, we might even get more visitors from all over the world to celebrate our Southern heritage with us if we don't limit ourselves to just Confederate Memorial Day.

And with a name like Southern Heritage Day there's such a wide variety of stuff to celebrate that's Southern: We have the best food in the world; fascinating history from the early mound builders to the Seminole, Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes; there's our colonial history; our antebellum history; the Civil War; Reconstruction; lots of cool characters before, during and after the Civil War; the Civil Rights movement; our agriculture; our sports; we defined country and gospel music and gave the world blues, jazz and rock and roll; our literature and art is some of the best the world has ever seen; and we have the nicest people to share it all with — the name "Confederate Memorial Day" just doesn't get that message across.

Steve Gillespie is managing editor of The Meridian Star. E-mail him at sgillespie@themeridianstar.com

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