@mekkaokereke the province of Limburg is trying to restore the memory of the black soldiers in the village near Margraven. All kinds of stories are more published in our newspapers...

@mekkaokereke @webhat fact check: true? How did the Dutch EVER cave to that??? @1sand0s ??

@mekkaokereke my father was a child in occupied Holland during WWII and I remember him saying the US black soldiers were the first black people he ever saw in his young life and they were revered by locals. They and the other liberating forces left a lasting impression on him.

He was quite shocked to the state of things when he grew up and immigrated to the US in the early 60s.

@mekkaokereke forced the Dutch to remove it? How?

@mekkaokereke I wish we were half as just and fair as you imagined us, but unfortunately we weren’t.

The French military ordered their (considerable) black colonial units to not go to the big Paris liberation parade either. I forgot where exactly, but there was an order that pretty much boiled down to „no colonial units north of this line on the map“.

You can hear more about it (and other parts of unequal treatment) in this 2.5 hours long radio show about forgotten colonial unit veterans of the allies in ww2
https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/lange-nacht-ueber-afrika-asien-und-ozeanien-im-2-weltkrieg-100.html

@mekkaokereke

I hope the Dutch just moved the memorial to another place, rather than take it down.

@mekkaokereke There's a call for a memorial next to the cemetary from the provincial council (though obviously not backed by the racist right-wing parties)

https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/11/calls-for-permanent-memorial-in-limburg-to-black-us-liberators/

@mekkaokereke
I mostly have no fucks left to give, but I just found one in the back:

FUCK THOSE RACISTS.

@mekkaokereke as someone living in the Netherlands I didn't know, that's awful the government agreed to that

@mekkaokereke The French were indeed shocked by the overt racism of the Americans, but around the same time they massacred an unknown number (estimates up to 400) of their own Senegalese troops for refusing to disperse to their homes without the demobilisation pay to which they were entitled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiaroye_massacre

Still being rehashed and reassessed in French political life: https://www.franceinfo.fr/culture/patrimoine/histoire/au-senegal-des-archeologues-exhument-les-corps-du-cimetiere-de-thiaroye-pour-elucider-le-massacre-des-tirailleurs_7580245.html

@mekkaokereke every day, more and more reasons to hate this regime and the damage they are doing. 🤬

So of course, it is the same 761 unit that was among those prevented from celebrating the liberation of Paris that they were so instrumental in bringing about...

That was part of the force that liberated Netherlands, and whose dead are among those honored by the Dutch at the cemetery in Margraten.

Some things that are true:

* Black soldiers have served with distinction in every major US war

* Racist white people will always try to minimize the accomplishments of Black soldiers or erase them completely

"Double victory" describes Black soldiers' need to fight oppression abroad and at home
🙂🙃

This type of attempted racist erasure doesn't even make sense in the digital era.

There were over 1 million Black US soldiers who fought in WW2. You can buy as many Twitters and newspapers and TV stations and remove as many plaques as you like. You can't hide all those stories.