Retired Army Lt. Colonel Barnard Kemter was in the middle of his keynote Memorial Day speech to a crowd of three hundred people in Hudson, Ohio when his mic went out.  Thinking it was a technical glitch, he asked for help, but the public address system wasn’t restored, so he carried on in his “Army command voice” without the mic.

According to the Washington Post, after he finished his speech, he learned that the outage wasn’t due to a technical glitch; it was done intentionally by the organizers of the event, the Hudson American Legion Auxiliary, who objected to Kemter including the fact that Memorial Day commemorations started with freed Black slaves in Charleston, South Carolina honoring the slain Union soldiers who liberated them in the months after the Civil War ended.

“We asked him to modify his speech, and he chose not to do that,” Cindy Suchan, president of the Hudson American Legion Auxiliary, told a local media outlet. 

“I was very disappointed that someone would choose to censor my speech,” the 77-year-old Kemter, a 30-year veteran of the Army, told The Post.  A native of Hudson, Kemter was invited by the local Auxiliary to be the keynote speaker in the town’s Memorial Day celebration.  “Throughout history, there has been a lot of claims about who actually performed the first Memorial Day service.  With this speech, I chose to educate people as to the origin of Memorial Day and why we were celebrating it.”

It was no coincidence that Kemter’s mic was muted while he was talking about the Black history behind Memorial Day.  In an interview with the Akron Beacon Journal, Suchan said either she or American Legion Lee-Bishop Post 464 adjudant Jim Garrison turned down the volume because the “theme of the day was honoring Hudson veterans.”

A town of 22,000 people in Northeast Ohio, Hudson’s population is more than 92% white.

The Ohio Department of the American Legion, the statewide organization, is investigating the incident.  “We take this matter and its allegations seriously. We will investigate and take disciplinary action if necessary,” tweeted the group.