Retired Army Lt. Col. Barnard Kemter was giving a Memorial Day speech Monday when he experienced what he thought was a simple technical glitch. While discussing the holiday’s traditional ties to enslaved Black Americans, Kemter’s microphone was muted for two minutes of his 11-minute speech.
Kemter was invited to a Memorial Day celebration at Hudson, Ohio’s Markillie Cemetery, the Akron Beacon Journal reported. The retired veteran’s speech went uninterrupted until he began talking to the crowd about enslaved Black people honoring dead soldiers following the end of the Civil War in the mid-1800s.
“I assumed it was a technical glitch,” the 77-year-old told the Washington Post about the Memorial Day incident, not considering an intentional interference at the time. An audio engineer for the event later informed Kemter that “it was not a malfunction.”
According to the Akron Beacon Journal, Hudson American Legion Auxiliary President Cindy Suchan claimed that the event’s organizers wanted to exclude the Black history portion of Kemter’s speech because it “was not relevant to our program for the day,” continuing that “theme of the day was honoring Hudson veterans.”
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Suchan reviewed Kemter’s speech prior to Monday’s event. The Akron Beacon Journal reported that she “asked him to modify his speech, and he chose not to do that.”
But as Kemter states, he simply wanted to share the origins of Memorial Day, which couldn’t be more relevant to his speech. According to the Akron Beacon Journal, the retired veteran said that he received multiple compliments, with some people telling Kemter that they had never heard the story before.
“I find it interesting that [the American Legion]…would take it upon themselves to censor my speech and deny me my First Amendment right to [freedom of] speech…This is not the same country I fought for,” Kemter told the Akron Beacon Journal about the muting.
