REMEMBERING AMERICA’S FIRST MEMORIAL DAY

If you ask most Americans when we celebrate Memorial Day, they are likely to give you the date — May 30th because that’s when our nation honors servicemen and women, many of who gave their lives in combat. Generations of whitewashed history created Swiss cheese gaps in our national memory. Doesn’t anyone remember America’s first Memorial Day? According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Blight, approximately 10,000 people, most of them Black, formerly enslaved citizens, gathered on May 1, 1865, a little more than a month after the Civil War ended, to honor slain soldiers.

In Charleston, South Carolina, Confederate soldiers held Union soldiers they captured as prisoners at this racecourse during the Civil War. According to Blight’s book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, “at least 257 prisoners died, many of disease, and were buried in unmarked graves.” The inhumanity of war left the grisly remains of a Civil War Prison Camp, where months prior, Union soldiers suffered “sadistic treatment.” Black Charleson residents organized America’s first Memorial Day to give a proper burial to those Union soldiers who fought to secure their freedom.

America’s first memorial day became a celebration of Black liberty and patriotism, but racism blocked an opportunity for the nation to commemorate. In today’s America, there will be no drums sounding off in the distance, Air Force jets flying overhead, no celebratory fireworks to remember Union soldiers' lives on May 1st. America’s first memorial day has been ignored and systematically replaced.

Starting at 9 in the morning, 3,000 Black school children “paraded around the race track holding roses,” singing a Union hymn, “John Brown’s Body.” The lyrics couldn’t be more relevant on that day, “Old John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave/ While weep the sons of bondage whom he ventured all to save; John Brown died that the slaves might be free/, But his soul goes marching on.” The day was solemn but joyful. About ten days before, two dozen “African American Charlestonians reorganized the graves into rows and built a 10-foot tall white fence around them. An archway overhead spelled out “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

There was nothing civil about America’s Civil War. Southern public spaces became battlefields, prisons, and graveyards. Unlike Northerners who could simply return home, Black Southerners had to rebuild, and part of that restructuring included honoring the dead, who the Confederate soldiers refused to honor. Sometimes, Americans seem so eager to forget the conflict arising from the Civil War that they fail to honor the Union Army’s service. This national forgetting is heartbreaking since the United States is only united because of the Union Army.

James Redpath, a White man who became director of “freedman’s education in the region organized” joined in the celebration. Redpath instructed 30 speeches to be read by Union officers, abolitionists, and Black ministers. “White and Black Union regiments marched around the graves and staged a drill.” Onlookers described witnessing a sea of flowers as the mournful crowd honored fallen soldiers.

In today’s America, there will be no drums sounding off in the distance, Air Force jets flying overhead, no celebratory fireworks to remember Union soldiers’ lives on May 1st.

The event honoring the “Martyrs of the Racecourse” became America’s first Memorial Day. Sadly, the “Martyrs of the Race Course cemetery is no longer there.” South Carolina residents replaced the site honoring Union soldiers with “a park honoring a White Supremacist Confederate General,” Wade Hampton, a man who owned 3,000 slaves during the Antebellum era and became governor in 1865.

Removing Union soldiers’ gravestones was disrespectful to those men who gave their lives to bring America closer to its founding principles. So now, on May 1st, Americans do not celebrate the nation’s first Memorial Day, and the graves of the “Martyrs of the Race Course” no longer serve as a monument to their sacrifice. Maybe one day, America will embrace Black History, but until then, we’re left with a society more concerned with preserving faux unity than celebrating our shared history, and pursuit of a multiracial democracy.