Celebrating the Black History of Memorial Day
“In the struggle over memory and meaning in any society, some stories just get lost while others attain mainstream recognition,”
– Dr. David W. Blight, a historian at Yale
Memorial Day, originally known as Decoration Day, was started by a group of African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, right after the Civil War ended.1 The former slaves wanted to honor 257 dead Union Soldiers who had been buried in a mass grave in a Confederate prison camp. They dug up the bodies and worked for two weeks to give them a proper burial as gratitude for fighting for their freedom.2
Time magazine wrote about the forgotten back history of Memorial Day by pointing to historians like the Pulitzer Prize winner David Blight, who have tried to “raise awareness of freed slaves who decorated soldiers’ graves, to make sure their story gets told too.” 3
As always there is so much to learn. If you’d like to read more, watch this clip “The First Memorial Day with David W. Blight” and continue to read the article below from the NY Times4. Click for the full article and scroll down for additional resources.
The Unofficial History of Memorial Day Click to read the source of the article
“The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration,” Dr. Blight wrote in a 2011 essay for The New York Times. “The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.”
The African-American origins of the holiday were later suppressed, Dr. Blight found, by white Southerners who reclaimed power after the end of Reconstruction and interpreted Memorial Day as a holiday of reconciliation, marking sacrifices — by white Americans — on both sides. Black Americans were largely marginalized in this narrative.
Additional resources
Black people may have started Memorial Day. Whites erased it from history.
Read it: Washington Post
One of the Earliest Memorial Day Ceremonies Was Held by Freed African Americans
Read it: History Channel
The Often Overlooked Black Origins Of Memorial Day
Read it: Essence
The First Memorial Day with David W. Blight
Watch it: New York Historical Society
Sources
1) blackhistory.com 2) snopes.com 3) time.com 4) NY Times
