The 2024 Ardmore Memorial Day Parade: Reflection on a site of tradition, the state and remembering
(~650 words/3min)
The Leon Spencer Reid, American Legion Post 547 was chartered August 15th, 1932. The first meeting place was addressed, 207 West County Line Road. With William H. Williams, Commander, Fred F. Pennington, Adjutant, Richard Perry, Treasurer, William C. Thornton, Historian and Brovell Holland, Service Officer as chartered members.
My father has led or been a part of organizing the annual Ardmore Memorial Day parade and festivities with this American Legion post every year since I could imagine a memory. Predating my birth, my mother and aunt stepped with their drill team through these streets in primary school. This event acts as a communal moment of recollection and joy in an otherwise contorted juncture: being Black, in the United States, being enlisted in its military and dying. Embedded in every American holiday is the ever so obvious or subtle scent of terror for Black Americans, Memorial Day is no different. Holding residues of Black and poor people being targeted by recruiter’s as the way out of one “trenches,” into another, only to still be met with another mode of death. Concurrently, The day positions itself as a place of reverence for ancestors and in Ardmore it continues to accumulate into a community watering hole: a node that has seen my mother, father, aunties, grand and great grandparents in excess. This place was like lore growing up not living in the area. All the doings seemed mystical, poetic, maybe spell casting at times.
(Opening Reprise) Leon Spencer Reid American Legion Post 547, Front Entrance, 2024, 35mm photograph
Even in the making of those whimsical moments death is still close. Later this same evening there would be another entanglement of violence, a shooting. As of now, one person remains in serious condition and another being chased. And still, The event holds its place on a dwindling list of sites where one can mingle and meander amongst generations of Black people who have known each other's tribulations and kin across over a century. The needle threads, “my auntie babysat her mom, my pop pop is his great uncle.” By blood and play but kin nonetheless, they are foundational relationships– things that bind you through time. So violence, love, trouble, and other passing-ons transpire across generations with the possibility of all sorts of ancestors criss-crossed up with varied ethics and morals.
A web of kinship is woven here. People are seen here. Seen as in thoughtfully perceived, unraveled, confronted and committed to remembrance. It occurs at the confluences of stepping, stoop sitting, flag twirling, bouncy house rough housing, reverberating feedback loops of energy: person to person, year to year, cousin to cousin. These images documenting tradition are laced with state origins to be reckoned with on their own. Here we evoke memories of our loved ones exploited by the state and linger with them.
Witness the sediment shift, the gaping valley, a weaving river, 2024, 35mm photograph
Look at these communal moments of recollection and joy in an otherwise incalculable rubix. Ardmore, Pennsylvania is residence to generations of Black working class families on the edge of Philadelphia. One of the Black centrodes of “the mainline,” Philly. The place hums, rumbles and bustles with intertwined planes of being. These types of days hum the furthest. It's a gargantuan well of memories, stories and sensations for anyone with care or curiosity to engage in over a century of northern flavored racial dynamics through architecture, employment, and desire.
Bellow through the wake, 2024, 35mm photograph
A human will make the ground quiver, another will calm it, 2024, 35mm photograph
So many things happened, then happened again and again and, now we’re here—tradition. There is struggle in reconciling with the inability to refuse the conflicts of days and places like this, nonetheless they/we continue. Draped in the past, orchestrating the present, conjuring a future in loop after loop, infinitely iterating. Maybe the weight beared among our backs through these reckonings with nations– nationalism, are unused wings with potential to soar us into the sky (if we could get them flapping). Meanwhile, the sky offers its inaugural torrential downpour. It scatters us among the street tents seeking shelter. The summer season is temporally marked by this tradition, these people in this place. These images synthesize the reconciliation with complications that become tradition. Through it all I offer my thanks to the people of Ardmore and specifically my father for persisting as fact and lore in my memory.
We don’t need wings, we don’t need to fly, 2024, 35mm photograph
All images photographed by Derek Anthony Holland. Please contact if you would like to be credited by name.