Gold Star Mothers Day

Gold Star Mother’s Day is a day for people to recognize and honor those who have lost a son or daughter while serving the United States Armed Forces. It is observed in the United States on the last Sunday of September each year and is not a designated public holiday in the United States so public life is not affected.

American Gold Star Mothers, Inc. (AGSM), is a private nonprofit organization of American mothers who lost sons or daughters in the United States Armed Forces. The Gold Star Mothers was founded by Grace Darling Seibold of Washington, D.C. It was originally formed in 1928 (June 4) for mothers of those lost in World War I, and it holds a congressional charter under Title 36 § 211 of the United States Code. Its name came from the custom of families of servicemen hanging a banner called a Service Flag in the windows of their homes. The Service Flag had a star for each family member in the Armed Forces. Living servicemen were represented by a blue star, and those who had lost their lives were represented by a gold star.

For the first 77 years of its existence, AGSM restricted its membership criteria to admit only U.S. citizens. As a way to create pressure to change the rule, an application for admission was submitted in 2005 that deliberately highlighted the applicant’s lack of citizenship. The application, from Ligaya Lagman, a Filipino permanent resident of the United States living in Yonkers, New York, who had been living in the U.S. more than 20 years and whose son, Marine Staff Sgt. Anthony Lagman, was killed in action in Afghanistan in 2004 at the age of 26, was rejected in May 2005. In the next month after that incident, which received a "firestorm" of publicity that included negative commentary by New York U.S. Representative Eliot Engel and New York U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the group agreed on June 27, 2005, to change its membership criteria, and it accepted its first two non-citizens as members a few months later in early September 2005.

Source: goldstarmoms.com | wikipedia.org | whitehouse.gov

In 2021 Gold Star Mothers Day in USA falls on September 26.