How is it that we had not been taught — that it had not been a standard feature of American history— that Memorial Day, this most American of holidays, the unofficial start of summer, a day when the most observant among us will go to the cemetery and leave flowers on headstones or hang a flag in honor of those who sacrificed their lives in the military, actually began with African-Americans in the ashes of the Civil War?

 

The holiday we now call Memorial Day was first observed on May 1, 1865, in Charleston, SC, where thousands of newly freed slaves marched, prayed and laid flowers in gratitude to the fallen Union soldiers whose sacrifice had helped secure their freedom.

 

That spring, after the Confederates had evacuated Charleston at the end of the war, black residents cleaned the site of a mass grave of 257 Union soldiers. The laborers sifted through the rubble, dug out the bodies and gave the soldiers a proper burial.

That May 1, nearly 10,000 souls, most of them formerly enslaved black people, joined by union troops and northern white missionaries, gathered to dedicate the burial ground and to honor the fallen. Among the former slaves were 3,000 black children, like those pictured here, who would become among the first African-Americans permitted to attend school in the South with the opening of Freedom Schools.

 

 

The people sang hymns and spirituals and prayed. They laid flowers on the gravesite. The New York Tribune described it as “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

In their reverence for the ideals of liberty, they claimed their right to a country that they and their ancestors had built without pay. But this exclusion from the American narrative meant that few people over succeeding generations realized their contribution to something so indelible.

 

 

It is a tragedy that so much of our country’s true history has been withheld from us — we don’t know who we are as a nation, don’t know what we’re celebrating, don’t know how we got to where we are, and thus we don’t know how to fix what ails and divides us. It’s time that we learn our history and act upon it for the salvation of our democracy.