General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHistory of the holiday
African Americans invented Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina.
The first widely publicized observance of a Memorial Day-type observance after the Civil War was in Charleston, South Carolina, on May 1, 1865. During the war, Union soldiers who were prisoners of war had been held at the Hampton Park Race Course in Charleston; at least 257 Union prisoners died there and were hastily buried in unmarked graves. Together with teachers and missionaries, black residents of Charleston organized a May Day ceremony in 1865, which was covered by the New York Tribune and other national papers. The freedmen cleaned up and landscaped the burial ground, building an enclosure and an arch labeled "Martyrs of the Race Course". Nearly 10,000 people, mostly freedmen, gathered on May 1 to commemorate the war dead. Involved were about 3,000 school children, newly enrolled in freedmen's schools, as well as mutual aid societies, Union troops, black ministers and white northern missionaries. Most brought flowers to lay on the burial field.
David W. Blight described the day:
This was the first Memorial Day. African Americans invented Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina. What you have there is black Americans recently freed from slavery announcing to the world with their flowers, their feet, and their songs what the war had been about. What they basically were creating was the Independence Day of a Second American Revolution.>>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Day
Igel
(35,320 posts)That Wiki verbum's been subject to a lot of editing in the last 48 hours, and still Wiki shows that this is part of the history.
But for many, it has to be the entirety of the history because then it allows a very narrow, very specific claim and set of counterclaims.
Meh. Southern-style nationalism.
REP
(21,691 posts)This other story is a newer "discovery," if true. It's a nice enough legend that deserves to be true, but probably isn't. (A branch of my family has been in Charleston since the early 1700s and no one had ever heard of this story.)