An Extra Wreath for Obama on Memorial Day

ARLINGTON, Va. — President Obama observed Memorial Day on Monday just as his predecessors have: by placing a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier here. But Mr. Obama added a new twist: he sent a second wreath to a memorial honoring African-Americans who fought in the Civil War.

Presidents since Warren G. Harding have marked Memorial Day by visiting Arlington National Cemetery, where white rows of tombstones mark more than seven generations of America’s war dead. But with the nation’s first African-American president in office, a controversy erupted over Mr. Obama’s appearance this year.

Last week, a group of university professors petitioned the White House to end a longstanding practice of sending a wreath to a monument to Confederate soldiers on the cemetery grounds. Mr. Obama continued that tradition but started another, the White House said, by sending a second wreath across the Potomac River to the historically black neighborhood in Washington where the African-American Civil War Memorial commemorates more than 200,000 blacks who fought for the North in the Civil War.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/us/politics/26wreath.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

no one can possibly complain about this without looking like a petty asshole.

I am opposed to ending the tradition of honoring the Confederate dead. I am glad our president is, too. But he is brilliant to start this new tradition.

Good for him.

...that must have REALLY pissed off the southern folk

There were black confederate soldiers, and some sources I've seen claim there were over 65,000 of them, with over 13,000 seeing combat. Others say they were only a minor part of the Confederate armed forces-- I'm still trying to figure out which is closer to the truth. One contemporary witness cited by a Wikipedia article said that there were over 3,000 in Stonewall Jackson's army that occupied Frederick, MD in 1862. There's not much information out there on black confederate soldiers, it seems because they've been swept under the rug by racists and anti-racists since the end of the war.

Thank you Obama.

'Why not send two wreaths?'
The African American Civil War Memorial had been discussed as a compromise in recent days.

"President Obama, why not send two wreaths?" Kirk Savage, an art history professor at the University of Pittsburgh, wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post. "One to the Confederate Memorial in Arlington Cemetery and another to the African American Civil War Memorial in the District, which commemorates the 200,000 black soldiers who fought for liberation from slavery in the Union armed forces."



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30925896 /


It is still really cool. He placed the wreath himself so I don't care if it wasn't 100% his idea. He created the new tradition.