The first Memorial Day on record was held by freed African Americans
The mention of Memorial Day easily conjures images of cookouts, military ceremonies, and gravesite visits, and yet, the stories of how these traditions were born are still under-told.
Fundamentally we’re taught that Memorial Day is about remembering the veterans who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice to secure our freedoms as Americans, but what’s too often omitted is that the first Memorial Day celebration on record dates back to 1865 when newly emancipated Black people in Charleston, South Carolina exhumed a mass grave for Union soldiers who made that sacrifice toward the end of the civil war.
Union soldiers were held as captives by the Confederacy in Charleston’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, a country club that had been converted into a prison. When the Union army seized Charleston, emancipated peoples honored the sacrifices of the brutalized and discarded soldiers who died in prison by giving them a new burial, according to History.com.
In a grand gesture of care, the emancipated exhumed the mass grave of roughly 260 Union soldiers in April 1865 and reinterred each soldier in their own grave in a new cemetery they built with a tall white-washed fence; the effort took about two weeks according to the College of Charleston. On the fence, free Black Americans wrote the words “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
On May 1, 1865, almost a month after the Civil War formally ended with the Confederate army in Virginia’s surrender, Charleston’s Black community, white missionaries, and school children threw a parade that drew over 10,000 people at the race track. It was replete with songs, marches, flowers, prayers and a picnic, according to some of the earliest articles from the Charleston Courier and the New York Tribune.
https://thegrio.com/2021/05/31/first-memorial-day-held-by-freed-african-americans/
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