Memorial Day Founded on the Souls of Black Folk

Often lost in all of the Memorial Day barbecuing, parading and flag-waving is not just the day's true meaning - remembering fallen American soldiers- but the day's true origins.

The first ever Memorial Day was celebrated on May 1, 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina by former African-American slaves. They called their celebration Decoration Day, and it was in honor of some 250 or so Union Soldiers who died in an encampment on the site of an old horseracing track.

This bit of history has largely been lost, tucked away in the dusty recesses of Southern archives, forgotten, perhaps with intention, by those in the late 18th Century who sought to control the historical narrative and the meaning of the Civil War.

While oral histories passed down through black families in Charleston of a glorious day in 1865 when more than 10,000 blacks marched and sang and prayed over the graves of the Union soldiers buried there, the story had remained the stuff of hushed legend until David Blight, a historian at Yale University, stumbled upon it in the late 1990s while doing research for a book he was writing.

He was parsing through a "hopelessly disorganized" trove of material at the Houghton Library at Harvard University when he made a fascinating discovery inside a box of papers. It was a folder labeled "First Decoration Day," and when he cracked it open a piece of cardboard-like paper slid out.

On it was a handwritten narrative, probably written by a Civil War veteran, describing in detail what happened that day at the racetrack.

"When I read it I could hardly believe my eyes," said Blight, the author of several books, including 'Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.'

The more research he did the more detail he uncovered and a clear picture emerged of what is likely (though several other states have laid claim) the very first celebration of scale of the war's dead.

The end of the Civil War had just come, leaving behind a trail of death and destruction from North to South. About 620,000 soldiers from both sides of the Mason Dixon were killed. And of the 180,000 or so black soldiers that fought for the Union military, roughly 20 percent of them were killed. Southern cities like Charleston lay in rubble.

President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated in April of 1865. Gen. Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate troops, had surrendered in the first week of May. The country, particularly the South, was in ruins, soaked in the blood let by war. The slaves had been freed. The North and South were just beginning a long and arduous road to healing, if such a notion could have been imagined at the time.

This was the backdrop of what happened that day in May some 146 years ago. It was a Monday morning on the grounds of an old racecourse in Charleston, which at one time was a gem of the city's gentry, its socialites and its wealthy, according to Blight and various histories.

But in the waning last year of the war the course's grounds had been turned into a prison camp and a burial ground for hundreds of Union soldiers who died there. For weeks after the war officially ended, former slaves, about 25 in all, did the dirty work of burying those dead soldiers.

Thousands upon thousands of former slaves, black school children and soldiers came together to honor those that died there. They sang 'John Brown's Body,' according to accounts. The black grave-diggers, according to Blight, built a fence around the cemetery and constructed an archway, which read "Martyrs of the Racetrack," or something close to it.

But how could such a huge event involving 10,000 people, 10,000 black people in the Deep South, be forgotten?

"It is, on the surface, hard to believe an event including ten thousand people could get lost," Blight said. "It got lost because the people in control of public memory by the mid to late 1870s were not the people who wanted to remember this."

In 1876, 11 years after the Civil War ended, with the white Southern elite tearing away at Reconstruction, a white-supremacist Democrat, Wade Hampton, became governor. They called him the "redeemer Governor," Blight said. "Redeeming white supremacy and control."

The era of the "lost cause" began then, and the powers started to define their version of the war, and by the 1880s and 1890s, there would be no recollection of the event in the official public memory in Charleston.

Since Blight's discovery about a dozen or so years ago, Charleston, which like so many other American cities is fraught with lingering racial divisions, has embraced the history. Last year some 200 black re-enactors, the mayor and other city officials, as well as various historians including Blight, marched across the site of the racetrack, ironically named after Wade Hampton, and placed a memorial plaque at the site.

"To the extent that it matter who was first," Blight said, "this particular event has a right to claim that distinction."