November 11, 2025 – As poppies bloom and ceremonies unfold across the United States and Commonwealth nations, Remembrance Day (or Veterans Day in the U.S.) invites us to pause and honor the millions who served in the World Wars and beyond. It is a day steeped in solemn gratitude for those who fought for democracy, freedom, and the end of tyranny. Yet, for Black Americans, this remembrance carries a profound duality. They have bled on foreign battlefields—from the trenches of World War I to the sands of World War II—only to return to a homeland where the government’s complicity in racial terror rendered their sacrifices bittersweet.
In 1919, the year after World War I’s armistice, Black veterans marching in uniform were lynched by white mobs. This “Red Summer” of racial violence, which claimed hundreds of Black lives across 26 cities, underscored a cruel irony: Black soldiers defended liberty abroad while facing state-sanctioned oppression at home. Today, as we reflect on these global conflicts, it is incumbent upon us to reckon with the domestic horrors inflicted upon Black communities by the American government. These atrocities—ranging from legalized bondage to medical experimentation—were not mere lapses but deliberate mechanisms of control, rooted in white supremacy.
Below, we chronicle 10 such atrocities, drawing from historical records to illuminate the enduring scars on Black America. This list is not exhaustive, but it is a stark reminder that true remembrance demands confronting the full spectrum of our nation’s story.
1. The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Chattel Slavery (1619–1865)
The U.S. government enshrined the enslavement of millions of Africans as a cornerstone of its economy, with laws like the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 mandating their recapture. An estimated 12.5 million Africans were forcibly transported, with millions dying en route or in bondage. Life expectancy for enslaved Black people hovered around 21–22 years, marked by routine whippings, family separations, and forced breeding—acts of genocide by any measure.
2. Lynchings and Racial Terror (1877–1950)
From the end of Reconstruction onward, over 4,400 Black people were lynched, often with local sheriffs and National Guard units standing by or participating. The federal government turned a blind eye, failing to pass anti-lynching legislation until 2022. These public spectacles, including burnings and castrations, aimed to suppress Black voting and economic progress, enforcing a climate of fear.
3. The Wilmington Massacre and Coup (1898)
In Wilmington, North Carolina, white supremacists—backed by state officials and the press—overthrew the multiracial Fusionist government, killing at least 60 Black residents and exiling hundreds. The U.S. government refused federal intervention, allowing this violent overthrow of a democratically elected Black-led coalition, setting a precedent for disenfranchisement.
4. The Elaine Massacre (1919)
Arkansas sharecroppers organizing for better wages were met with a mob of 1,000 white men deputized by the governor. Federal troops were deployed not to protect but to suppress Black survivors, resulting in up to 237 deaths. This “Red Summer” event exemplified government weaponization against Black labor rights.
5. The Tulsa Race Massacre (1921)
Oklahoma’s National Guard joined white mobs in bombing and burning the prosperous Black district of Greenwood (“Black Wall Street”), killing 300 Black residents and displacing 10,000. The state government covered it up for decades, denying survivors insurance claims and reparations, erasing a thriving community from history.
6. Convict Leasing (1865–1920s)
Southern states, with federal acquiescence, leased Black prisoners—often arrested on fabricated charges under Black Codes—to private companies for forced labor in mines and farms. This “slavery by another name” caused death rates exceeding 40% annually, perpetuating bondage under the guise of criminal justice.
7. Compulsory Sterilization Programs (Early 1900s–1970s)
State governments, supported by federal eugenics policies, forcibly sterilized thousands of Black women, often under duress or deception. In North Carolina alone, Black women comprised 64% of victims by the 1960s. These procedures, tied to welfare threats, aimed to curb Black population growth.
8. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (1932–1972)
The U.S. Public Health Service withheld penicillin from 399 Black men with syphilis in Alabama, allowing the disease to ravage them for study. Dozens died, and generations suffered untreated symptoms. President Clinton apologized in 1997, but the betrayal of medical trust lingers.
9. The 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing (1963)
Ku Klux Klan dynamite killed four Black girls in Birmingham, Alabama, amid a wave of civil rights violence. The FBI had prior knowledge of the plot but delayed action; local police, under Commissioner Bull Connor, had brutalized protesters with dogs and fire hoses. Only in 2002 were the bombers fully prosecuted, highlighting federal inaction.
10. COINTELPRO Operations (1956–1971)
The FBI’s covert program targeted Black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panther Party with surveillance, disinformation, and assassinations (e.g., Fred Hampton in 1969). This government-orchestrated sabotage aimed to dismantle Black liberation movements, fostering paranoia and division.
These atrocities were not anomalies but threads in a tapestry of systemic racism, from the Dred Scott decision declaring Black people non-citizens to modern mass incarceration echoing convict leasing. On this Remembrance Day, as we salute Black veterans—who made up 13% of World War I draftees despite segregation—we must ask: How do we honor their valor without addressing the government’s role in their subjugation?
Remembrance is incomplete without reparative justice. Calls for truth commissions, land returns (as in Tulsa), and policy reforms grow louder. Until we dismantle the structures that enabled these horrors, the poppies wilt in the shadow of unhealed wounds. Let this day be a catalyst for atonement, ensuring that Black Americans’ sacrifices—on and off the battlefield—are not in vain.
You may remember the traditional Memorial Day with parades of red, white, and blue, barbecues under cloudless skies, and solemn toasts to fallen soldiers whose valor we etch in marble and myth—yet for me, this day unfurls like a shroud over the unburied graves of my ancestors, the Black souls whose blood soaked American soil not in defense of liberty, but as offerings to its denial. I recall the ghosts of Tulsa’s burning streets, the nooses swaying from courthouse oaks in broad daylight, the dynamite shattering Sunday school hymns in Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, and the government’s cold calculus in Tuskegee labs, where syphilis was a sentence passed in white coats.
These are not footnotes in history’s ledger but the ledger itself, pages torn and rewritten to fit the narrative of progress, while we, the descendants, sift through the ashes for fragments of justice. Today, for me, should be renamed “Forgetting Day“—a bitter requiem not for the honored dead, but for the deliberate amnesia that allows fireworks to eclipse the screams, letting the nation salute its heroes while stepping over the bones of those it betrayed. In this selective memory, true remembrance dies first, and with it, any hope of resurrection.