When We Gather, We Remember: An Afro-Filipino Reflection on Service, Joy, and Memorial Day
By Dr. Curtis Ladrillo Chamblee

I come from a lineage of service.

As an Afro-Filipino, I was born into a world where duty was not just expected, it was modeled. My father, uncles, and brother all enlisted in the United States Air Force. I followed that same path from 1995 to 1998, raising my right hand and stepping into a legacy that stretched across oceans and generations.

And while I served during peacetime, I knew that the weight of that uniform was never light. Even when the skies were clear, the role carried a deep and complex history, especially for someone like me, whose Blackness and brownness never came off with the uniform. My skin, my name, my very presence were always part of the story.

This Memorial Day, I remember not just the fallen, but the living legacies they left behind. I remember what it meant to serve as an Afro-Filipino man on American soil, under American command, while holding on to a rich heritage shaped by migration, resistance, and resilience. Service was never just about discipline or command. It was about community. And that is what gives me hope.

I think back to a Memorial Day spent on base at Andrews Air Force Base, where the dorms turned into a celebration of life and laughter. That day, we did not gather to mourn, we gathered to remember through joy. It started as a simple barbecue. Folks pulled up with coolers, plates of chicken and ribs, baked mac, lumpia, and potato salad with that one cousin’s secret recipe. And as the music turned up, the games came out. Spades on one table. Dominoes on another. The sound of bones slamming, trash talk flying, and laughter echoing through the courtyard reminded us that being alive and being together was itself a kind of tribute.

There were Black airmen from Mississippi, Puerto Rican NCOs who made sure we were fed, Filipino techs who slid you an extra helping if you said “Salamat.” We were a whole diaspora in uniform. That day, the base became a mosaic of memory, identity, and celebration. And as people flowed in from every dorm and hangar, it felt like we were doing more than throwing a party, we were creating sanctuary. Joy was our resistance. Community was our armor.

These moments shaped me just as much as the drills, the formations, or the creeds. They were formative not just for the man I was then, but for the scholar, teacher, and cultural worker I am today. My commitment to understanding the world, how identity, place, and history shape our sense of belonging, can be traced back to those moments in uniform, when we came together across lines of race, culture, and memory. The Air Force did not just give me structure. It gave me insight into how people carry their stories with them, how they build chosen families when they are far from home, and how shared struggle and shared laughter create unbreakable bonds.
That’s what Memorial Day means to me.

It is a reminder that service does not stop when the uniform comes off. It shows up in how we love, how we build, how we teach, and how we hold space for others. For those of us with complex identities, Afro, Filipino, American, service has always meant more than one thing at a time. It has meant making room for all our languages, all our lineages, and all our losses. And through it all, finding joy anyway.

Today, I honor those who never made it home, but I also uplift those who did, carrying invisible wounds and visible pride. I think of the families who gathered around folded flags, and the friends who keep their stories alive. I think of my fellow airmen, from every corner of the world, who shared ribs and laughter and music with me that Memorial Day in the dorms, reminding me that we serve not just for a nation, but for one another.

In a world that often feels heavy with grief, violence, and division, I still believe in what I learned on base that day which is, community saves lives. That joy is sacred. That stories matter.

And that service, when rooted in love and legacy, can be a force of healing.

So, this Memorial Day, I offer a simple reflection from an Afro-Filipino heart: when we gather, we remember. And when we remember, we rise.

Dr. Curtis Ladrillo Chamblee is an Afro-Filipino veteran, and critical cultural and media scholar whose research and public writing explore the intersections of identity, place, memory, and media. A former United States Air Force airman (1995–1998), Curtis brings lived experience into his work as a teacher and writer, examining how Blackness, Brownness, and belonging shape personal and communal histories. He currently serves as a doctoral candidate in Communication & Film at the University of Memphis and teaches in the First-Year Writing Program at the University of Minnesota. Curtis’s work honors the power of story, the resilience of community, and the sacredness of joy especially among those navigating complex cultural legacies.

The Lynching Sites Project of Memphis
By: Carla Peacher-Ryan

In 2015, a group of people at First Congregational Church had been having a discussion group about race, like all good liberal churches do, when we learned that Bryan Stevenson, of the Equal Justice Initiative, was coming to a fundraiser in Memphis.  Two of our members went and urged us to take up Stevenson’s challenge – to research and memorialize the lynchings that had happened in Shelby County, Tennessee – more than in any other county in Tennessee.

Stevenson’s work regarding lynching grew out of his death-penalty defense practice – he sees the through line from historical lynchings of black people in America to today’s mass incarceration, police killings and the disproportionate impact that the death penalty has on black people, and importantly, how our willful ignorance about, and active covering up, of the history of lynching atrocities perpetuate this cycle.

A research group formed and started meeting in 2016.  We were incredibly lucky to find a person who had spent a large part of her professional life studying lynching, Dr. Margaret Vandiver, who joined us and has guided our work from the beginning.

Our first historical marker was in memory of Ell Persons.  In May, 1917 the decapitated body of a 16-year-old white girl, named Antoinette Rappel, was found at the old Wolf River Bridge near what is now Summer Ave. Suspicion fell on Ell Persons, an African American woodcutter who lived nearby.  Persons was arrested twice, interrogated twice and released twice before being captured a third time and reportedly beaten into a confession.

Upon his capture by a mob, local newspapers announced that he would be burned the next morning.  A crowd, estimated at 3,000-5,000, gathered to watch. Vendors set up stands among the crowd and sold sandwiches and snacks. It was reportedly a carnival-like atmosphere.  James Weldon Johnson, the author of the lyrics of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and then the Field Secretary of the national NAACP, came to Memphis to investigate the lynching and said “I tried to balance the sufferings of the miserable victim against the moral degradation of Memphis, and the truth flashed over me that in large measure the race question involves the saving of black America’s body and white America’s soul.”

In May of 2017, on the centennial of the lynching, the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis held a commemoration ceremony at the lynching site attended by several hundred people, including elected officials and clergy.  Relatives of both Ell Persons and Antoinette Rappel – the teenager he was accused of, but never tried for, murdering – attended this ceremony.

LSP has since installed 3 other historical markers memorializing the lynching of Lee Walker, Name Unknown from 1851, and Wash Henly and another installation is planned in the next year for the site of the People’s Grocery lynching of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart.  We have held a number of commemorations of anniversaries of lynchings at various sites, including the lynching of Jesse Lee Bond in Arlington in 1939.   We are working to get the Ell Persons lynching site on the National Historic Register and are coordinating with the Wolf River Conservancy for its inclusion on the Wolf River Greenway that is planned to go near the lynching site.  Members of LSP are frequent speakers to school groups, church groups and community groups, and we also conduct tours of the various lynching sites in Shelby County.  We have made or contributed to several documentaries, have a podcast, The Red Record, and have an app with information about our markers and the lynchings in Shelby County.

There are also community meetings on the 2^nd Monday of each month, which have been held continuously for the last 10 years.  The meetings are a time for difficult, courageous conversations and relevant speakers.  For more information, please visit our website at lynchingsitesmem.org

Bio:
Carla Peacher-Ryan is a retired attorney from Memphis, Tennessee, who is recognized for her involvement in social justice initiatives. She gained public attention after uncovering her family’s troubling history related to her great-uncle, Paul Peacher, who was convicted of enslaving 13 Black men in 1936 in Arkansas. She has been a member of the Lynching Sites Project since its inception, and is a former Advisory Board member with the Hooks Institute.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the great civil rights and human rights leader, once urged activists to stay encouraged through both victories and setbacks. He famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Dr. King understood that this arc does not move in a straight line. Often, it lies invisible beneath the surface of despair—until, through resilience and action, it breaks into the light at pivotal moments.

But the arc won’t bend on its own. It is only bent through the tireless courage and determination of leaders and ordinary people who keep pressing forward, even in the face of profound disappointment.

It is with this perspective that I choose to view the May 7, 2025 not guilty verdicts in the state criminal case in Memphis, Tennessee against the former police officers who so brutally beat Tyre Nichols, ultimately causing his death. While these verdicts are deeply painful, I urge Memphians and others to use this moment not to give in to despair — or fall into fear — but to strengthen their resolve and join the ongoing struggle for justice.

As my mother, Fayette County civil rights activist Viola McFerren, often said, “What’s right for minority people is right for majority people.” Protecting the rights of marginalized communities ensures the protection of rights for all. This principle is echoed through generations—by the slavery abolitionists of the 1800s, the civil rights leaders of the 1960s, and today’s advocates working for justice, equality, and human dignity.

Social justice is not without heartbreak. There are days of deep disappointment, like May 7th, followed by moments of renewal that nourish our souls for the road ahead.

This verdict will take time for Memphis—and the nation—to process. And there must be space to mourn. But after mourning, I urge all of us to rise with renewed spirit and courage, to put our backs and hands once more against the arc, helping to bend it toward justice for African Americans, the poor, and all people of color.

Because truly, “what’s right for minority people is right for majority people.”

Daphene R. McFerren
Executive Director
The Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change

May is AAPI Heritage Month, a time meant to celebrate the richness, resilience, and range of Asian American and Pacific Islander identities. And yet, for those of us who live in the liminal spaces between categories, who carry blended lineages and complex migrations, this month often arrives with both pride and a quiet ache.

As an Afro-Filipino scholar, I exist in what feels like an intentional blind spot, too often rendered invisible in both Black and AAPI discourses. I am not a bridge between communities; I am the community. I am what it looks like when the maps are redrawn and the memory refuses to separate. My body is a geography of empire, survival, and cultural convergence.

I carry my father’s melanin and my mother’s Tagalog lullabies. I grew up with lumpia on the plate and Marvin Gaye in the background. I have watched Filipino elder’s light candles for their ancestors, and I have danced at cookouts to Frankie Beverly featuring Maze, and The Electric Slide, while uncles told stories about Malcolm, Martin, and Motown. I have been called “other” in both Asian and Black spaces, and I have learned to name myself when others refuse to.

The Philippines is often treated as an outlier in the AAPI narrative, tropical, colonized, Catholic, too American to be Asian, too Asian to be seen. And when you’re Black and Filipino? That tension doubles. You become something people want to admire but not engage. Curiosity without conversation. Celebration without understanding.

And yet… we are not new.

We are the legacy of migration and militarization.
We are the children of nurses and navymen.
We are the kids who knew José Rizal and James Baldwin in the same breath.
We are the spiritual descendants of both baybayin scripts and hip-hop cipher circles.
We are the in-between, and that in-between is sacred.

Reclaiming a Heritage That Remembers

To understand Afro-Filipino identity is to contend with colonial scars and spiritual survival. It is to carry Spain, America, and the Pacific in your bloodstream while searching for stories that look like your own.

That’s why I honor José Rizal, not just as a Filipino hero, but as a model for what it means to be dangerous with a pen. Rizal was a scholar, doctor, poet, and revolutionary whose words helped ignite a nation’s fight for freedom. He did not wage war with weapons, he used stories. His novel Noli Me Tangere pulled back the curtain on Spanish colonial violence in the Philippines. His follow-up, El Filibusterismo, was a slow-burn call for justice written by a man who knew he might die for telling the truth. And he did.

As a writer and scholar today, I hold Rizal’s legacy close, not as someone who lived in a time far removed from mine, but as someone who walked a similar terrain: empire, expectation, erasure. Rizal dared to imagine a freer world for his people. And I, too, write toward that imagining, not just for Filipinos, but for every blended Black and Brown child who has been told to pick a side when their soul knows it is whole.

What This Month Means to Me

AAPI Heritage Month should include us not as footnotes but as full chapters. We are not just here to add complexity to demographic data. We are here because our lives offer insight into how colonization, racialization, and diaspora have always been intertwined.

To be Afro-Filipino is to understand that identity is not static. It is not a box to be checked on a form it is a narrative you are constantly rewriting against silence. It is hearing your grandmother say “anak” and feeling your mother braid your hair while Stevie Wonder plays on the radio. It is knowing the smell of sinigang and soul food and understanding both are rituals.

As a scholar, I bring this duality into the classroom and into my research. My students don’t just get curriculum, they get culture, reflection, and refusal. I want them to see that knowledge is not neutral. That Blackness and Asianness are not binaries but rhythms that shape how we survive and how we speak. I want my students, especially those who exist at the intersections, to know that they do not have to shrink or fragment themselves to be legible. They already belong.

This month, I honor my Filipino lineage not as an accessory to my Blackness, but as part of the divine complexity that makes me whole. I celebrate not because the world has made space for me, but because I have learned to take up space anyway.

And I write this for every Afro-Asian student still searching for mirrors. For every child of two worlds who was told they had to choose. For every scholar who had to defend their existence before they could even begin their research.

We Are the Continuation, Not the Disruption

Afro-Filipino identity is not a deviation. It is a continuation of centuries of migration, love, resistance, and memory. We are what happens when colonization fails to erase, and when global Blackness reclaims what empire tried to divide.

We are not fragments.
We are full stories.
And this month, we remember that we belong, not because someone included us,
but because we have always been here.

A Final Word for the In-Between

I am the ocean between islands, the bridge between names. What they tried to divide, I carry as one.
They told me to choose a side. I chose to belong to myself.
My blood speaks in blended tongues, history, harmony, and the hush of what survived. This is not confusion. It is convergence.
I am the echo of a mother’s prayer and a grandfather’s fight. I am their unfinished sentence, still writing.

Curtis Ladrillo Chamblee M.A. is an Afro-Filipino scholar and doctoral candidate in Communication & Film at the University of Memphis. His work explores Black masculinity, media representation, and the power of place, bridging ancestral memory with cultural critique. As a co-editor of UpRooted: Autoethnographies of Belonging and Place and co-author on rhetorical fractals and examined Tupac Lyrics using an Afrocentric Lens, Curtis elevates voices across diaspora, legacy, and liberation.