History vs. Myth: The Truth About Memorial Day
Before Memorial Day became a national tradition, something remarkable took place in the ruins of the postwar South—so powerful that later generations would push it to the margins of American history.
Image: Frances Benjamin Johnston, Saluting the Flag at the Whittier Primary School, 1899-1900.
The Grass of Remembrance
It happened in Charleston, South Carolina, in the first spring of emancipation. On May 1, 1865, ten thousand Black men, women, and children gathered at an old race course, a once-opulent symbol of antebellum wealth that the Confederacy had converted into a prison camp for Union soldiers. They gathered not to celebrate a battle or to protest an injustice, but to bury the dead. In the waning weeks of the war, 257 Union prisoners had died there—of disease, of neglect, of despair—and been cast into a mass grave behind the grandstand. Now, the people who had once been enslaved came to raise them up.
On that first day of May, in the first year of peace, they came by the thousands—ten thousand men and women and children, most of them newly freed, all of them Black, gathering at the old racecourse in Charleston. The track had once echoed with the hooves of horses owned by slaveholding planters; during the last days of the war, it had echoed with the cries of Union prisoners dying of disease in hastily dug trenches behind the grandstand. Now, it echoed with hymns. And with roses.
No one ordered them to come. They came because they remembered. Because they had survived.
Because the dead had not.
They came with roses. With sermons. With songs. With schoolchildren—three thousand of them, marching in lines, each bearing a flower, each humming or singing the old abolitionist hymn, “John Brown’s Body.” Black pastors led prayers. Black troops stood in salute. A wooden arch was built above the burial ground, and across it, in bold lettering, someone had painted: Martyrs of the Race Course. And then, after hours of solemn ritual and music and testimony, the graves were decorated. They were not left bare again.
It was, as one newspaper would later write, “a procession of friends and mourners such as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.” But it was more than a procession. It was a declaration. A statement of historical authorship. For the Black citizens of Charleston—newly freed, barely weeks into their emancipation—had laid claim not just to the bodies in those graves, but to the memory of the war itself. They had buried the Union dead with honor. And in so doing, they had given birth to what would one day be called Memorial Day.
And yet, as so often happens when the contributions of Black Americans intersect with the making of national memory, the record was altered. The act of founding—the first Memorial Day—was obscured, reattributed, covered over by another version. It would be white women in Columbus, Georgia, or in Richmond, Virginia, who would be credited in the national record. It would be the Confederacy’s widows who were remembered for decorating graves.
The obscuring of the May 1 procession was not accidental. It was the result of a campaign—deliberate, organized, successful. That campaign had a name: the United Daughters of the Confederacy. And just as they built monuments to generals and named schools after secessionists, they also built a history, one where Black agency was always minimized, and where white loss was always sacralized. Decoration Day was theirs, they insisted—not something born of Black mourning, but of white grief. And as textbooks and civic rituals adopted their version, the memory of Charleston’s Black commemorators faded. What remained was the myth.
Years before the date that Americans today are taught to mark as the origin of Memorial Day, the formerly enslaved had already done what the nation would only later begin: honor the dead, grieve the cost, lay claim to the republic’s moral promise. That their story was forgotten is no surprise. As David Blight has shown in Race and Reunion, the erasure was part of a larger pattern. From the very beginning, the freedom struggle of Black Americans—their courage, their initiative, their leadership—was not just resisted. It was re-written.
And yet, the flowers were laid. The names were sung. The procession marched. The record may have been altered, but the memory endured.
Image: African American Civil War Memorial, Spirit of Freedom statue by Ed Hamilton 1997, NPS Photo Washington DC
Image: This 1865 photo from the Library of Congress shows the graves of the Union soldiers after former slaves and free Black men moved the bodies from a mass grave.
Image: Frances Benjamin Johnston, Saluting the Flag at the Whittier Primary School, 1899-1900.
Image: The plaque in Hampton Park commemorating the first Memorial Day was dedicated in 2010.
Image: Memorial Market in Hampton Park, Charleston, South Carolina.
Image: A Sketch of Union Cemetery–today Hampton Park –appeared in Harper Weekly magazine on May 18, 1867.
Image: Clubhouse at the race course where Union soldiers were held prisoner.Civil war photographs, 1861-1865, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Image: An Alfred Waud illustration of the.Union soldiers cemetery known as “Martyrs of the Race course” in Charleston, S.C.Morgan collection of Civil War drawings at the Library of Congress.
Image: Memorial Day with Black Americans sometime in the early 20th century. Library of Congress.
Intellectual Map
Primary Sources
“Decoration Day of May 1865.” New-York Tribune, May 1865.
“Union Soldiers Cemetery, ‘Martyrs of the Race Course,’ Charleston, S.C.” Harper’s Weekly, May 18, 1867.https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.21659/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
National Archives and Records Administration. “Civil War Prisoner of War Records, 1861–1865.”https://www.archives.gov/research/military/civil-war/resources
Archives and Records Administration. “Records of the Field Offices for the State of South Carolina, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865–1872.” https://nmaahc.si.edu/freedmens-bureau/record/fbs-1662423774659-1662424690831-0?utm_source=chatgpt.com
“Letters and Diaries from the Civil War.” University of Florida Digital Collections. https://pkyonge.uflib.ufl.edu/learn-about-collections/digital-collections/letters-and-diaries-from-the-civil-war/
Blight, David W. “The First Decoration Day.” Newark Star Ledger, April 27, 2015. https://www.davidwblight.com/public-history/2015/4/27/the-first-decoration-day-newark-star-ledger
Secondary Sources
Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
https://archive.org/details/racereunion00davi
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
https://archive.org/details/southernpastclas0000brun
Cox, Karen L. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003.
https://archive.org/details/dixiesdaughtersu0000coxk
Blight, David W. “Forgetting Why We Remember.” The New York Times, May 29, 2011.
Miller Jr., Edward A. Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1839–1915. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.
https://archive.org/details/fromslaverytopub0000uyao/page/n18/mode/1up
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780060158514
Gannon, Barbara. The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Website Sources
David W. Blight, “The First Decoration Day,” David Blight, April 27, 2015.
http://www.davidwblight.com/public-history/2015/4/27/the-first-decoration-day-newark-star-ledger
David W. Blight, “Lecture 19: The Civil War and Reconstruction, 1865–1877,” in The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, Yale University, accessed May 24, 2026.
https://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-119/lecture-19
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, “Memorial Day History,” National Cemetery Administration, accessed May 24, 2026.
https://www.cem.va.gov/history/Memorial-Day-History.asp
Charleston Area Southern Labor History Association, “Decoration Day: Charleston’s Gullah Community Honoring the Fallen First Memorial Day,” May 23, 2024.
Eliott C. McLaughlin, “The Surprising Story of How Memorial Day Was Started by Formerly Enslaved People.”
https://www.history.com/news/memorial-day-civil-war-slavery-charleston
NAACP Los Angeles, “Memorial Day in USA Founded by Blacks in 1865,” accessed May 24, 2026,
Lily Rothman, “The Black History of Memorial Day,” Time, May 25, 2020.
https://time.com/5836444/black-memorial-day/
Kevin M. Levin, “The Contested Confederate Roots of Memorial Day,” The Washington Post, May 26, 2019.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/05/26/contested-confederate-roots-memorial-day/
Nayaba Arinde, “Freed Slaves Started First Memorial Day in the U.S.,” New York Amsterdam News, May 25, 2023.
https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2023/05/25/freed-slaves-started-first-memorial-day-in-the-us/
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Very Beautiful piece and the importance of real history! Thank you!