--- title: The Forgotten Black History of How Memorial Day Started description: Historians have tried to raise awareness of the freed slaves who decorated soldiers' graves in 1865, but their story is often overlooked. canonical: https://time.com/5836444/black-memorial-day/ author: Olivia B. Waxman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2020-05-22T16:00:40.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:42:25.105Z article:section: History og:title: The Forgotten Black History of How Memorial Day Started og:description: Historians like the Pulitzer Prize winner David Blight have tried to raise awareness of freed slaves who decorated soldiers' graves in 1865 og:url: https://time.com/5836444/black-memorial-day/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8c463f1094aa1845/698a0e66457a521afad63fbf/black-history-memorial-day-1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2135 og:image:height: 1201 og:image:alt: black-history-memorial-day-1 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Forgotten Black History of How Memorial Day Started twitter:description: Historians like the Pulitzer Prize winner David Blight have tried to raise awareness of freed slaves who decorated soldiers' graves in 1865 twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8c463f1094aa1845/698a0e66457a521afad63fbf/black-history-memorial-day-1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Overlooked Black History of Memorial Day > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: TIME Explains Memorial Day [Watch (HLS stream): TIME Explains Memorial Day](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/tWXcaFmN.m3u8) (2:29)  _Published 2014-05-22. Here’s everything you need to know about Memorial Day, the holiday originally observed to remember fallen soldiers from the Civil War._  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer May 22, 2020 4:00 PM UTC  An April 1865 photo of the graves of Union soldiers buried at the race course-turned-Confederate-prison where historians believe the earliest Memorial Day ceremony took place. An April 1865 photo of the graves of Union soldiers buried at the race course-turned-Confederate-prison where historians believe the earliest Memorial Day ceremony took place. Civil war photographs, 1861-1865, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer May 22, 2020 4:00 PM UTC Nowadays, Memorial Day honors veterans of [all wars,](https://time.com/4770697/memorial-day/) but its roots are in America’s deadliest conflict, the Civil War. [Approximately 620,000 soldiers died](https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/civil-war-casualties), about [two-thirds from disease](https://time.com/5815367/coronavirus-deaths-comparison/). --- ### More from TIME --- The work of honoring the dead began right away all over the country, and several American towns [claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day](https://time.com/5291026/memorial-day-started-birthplace-history/). Researchers have traced the earliest annual commemoration to women who laid flowers on soldiers’ graves in the Civil War hospital town of Columbus, Miss., in April 1866\. But historians like the Pulitzer Prize winner David Blight have tried to raise awareness of freed slaves who decorated soldiers’ graves a year earlier, to make sure their story gets told too. According to Blight’s 2001 book _Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,_ a commemoration organized by freed slaves and some white missionaries took place on May 1, 1865, in Charleston, S.C., at a former planters’ racetrack where Confederates held captured Union soldiers during the last year of the war. At least 257 prisoners died, many of disease, and were buried in unmarked graves, so black residents of Charleston decided to give them a proper burial.  Clubhouse at the race course where Union soldiers were held prisoner. Civil war photographs, 1861-1865, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. In the approximately 10 days leading up to the event, roughly 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” in black letters. [_Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter_](http://time.com/newsletter-history) About 10,000 people, mostly black residents, participated in the May 1 tribute, according to coverage back then in the Charleston _Daily Courier_ and the New York _Tribune_. Starting at 9 a.m., about 3,000 black schoolchildren paraded around the race track holding roses and singing the Union song [“John Brown’s Body,”](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/brown-history-john-browns-body/) and were followed by adults representing aid societies for freed black men and women. Black pastors delivered sermons and led attendees in prayer and in the singing of spirituals, and there were picnics. James Redpath, the white director of freedman’s education in the region, organized about 30 speeches by Union officers, missionaries and black ministers. Participants sang patriotic songs like “America” and “We’ll Rally around the Flag” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In the afternoon, three white and black Union regiments marched around the graves and staged a drill. The New York _Tribune_ described the tribute as “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.” The gravesites looked like a “one mass of flowers” and “the breeze wafted the sweet perfumes from them” and “tears of joy” were shed. This tribute, “gave birth to an American tradition,” Blight wrote in _Race and Reunion_: “The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration.” In 1996, Blight stumbled upon a New York _Herald Tribune_ article detailing the tribute in a Harvard University [archive](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/opinion/30blight.html) — but the origin story it told was not the Memorial Day history that many white people had wanted to tell, he argues. About 50 years after the Civil War ended, someone at the United Daughters of the Confederacy asked the Ladies Memorial Association of Charleston to confirm that the May 1, 1865, tribute occurred, and received a reply from one S.C. Beckwith: “I regret that I was unable to gather any official information in answer to this.” Whether Beckwith actually knew about the tribute or not, Blight argues, the exchange illustrates “how white Charlestonians suppressed from memory this founding.” A 1937 book also [incorrectly stated](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Race%5Fand%5FReunion/3R-yvmpYaqAC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=only+knew+that+the+dead+they+were+honoring+had+raised+them+from+a+condition+of+servitude&pg=PA410&printsec=frontcover) that James Redpath singlehandedly organized the tribute — when in reality it was a group effort — and that it took place on May 30, when it actually took place on May 1\. That book also diminished the role of the African Americans involved by referring to them as “black hands which only knew that the dead they were honoring had raised them from a condition of servitude.”  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 The origin story that _did_ stick involves an 1868 call from General John A. Logan, president of a Union Army veterans group, urging Americans to decorate the graves of the fallen with flowers on May 30 of that year. The ceremony that took place in [Arlington National Cemetery](https://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/Explore/History/History-of-Arlington-National-Cemetery) that day has been considered the first official Memorial Day celebration. Memorial Day became a national holiday two decades later, in 1889, and it took a century before it was moved in 1968 to the last Monday of May, where it remains today. [According ](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/opinion/30blight.html)to Blight, Hampton Park, named after Confederate General Wade Hampton, replaced the gravesite at the Martyrs of the Race Course, and the graves were reinterred in the 1880s at a national cemetery in Beaufort, S.C. The fact that the freed slaves’ Memorial Day tribute is not as well remembered is emblematic of the struggle that would follow, as African Americans’ fight to be fully recognized for their contributions to American society continues to this day. ## Transcript Memorial Day is upon us. And as tradition goes it's a time for Americans to remember the brave men and women who fought and died for our country. It's also a time to enjoy a three- day weekend and finally break out that special edition, humongous, it's not spring until the first barbecue, UFO shaped, charcoal grill. But did you know two cities with the same name but in different states both claim to be the birthplace of this national holiday? Here's what you need to know about the history and traditions of Memorial Day. While the birthplace of the holiday might be contested we know the origin of Memorial Day came from the end of the U. S. Civil War. After the war, soldiers in the north and south decorated the graves of comrades who died, at least 600, 000 by the time fighting stopped. The U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs says one of the first instances of Americans honoring the fallen took place in Columbus, Mississippi April 25th, 1866. A group of women decorated the graves of Confederate and Union soldiers, but Americans in at least five other cities, including Columbus, Georgia, all seem to think they were first. A writer at the New York Times says the claims of the two Columbuses, Mississippi and Georgia, are the most nuanced and intertwined, with the misprinted newspaper date being the culprit in the who- did- it- first feud. But he also mentions a forgotten event in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1865, that might have triggered it all. Black workmen properly reburied the Union dead that were found there. And on May 1st, a cemetery dedication was held, attended by thousands of freed Blacks who marched in procession around the track. Despite all that, Waterloo, New York was named the birthplace of Memorial Day in 1966 because of a ceremony for fallen soldiers that took place a century prior. In 1868, Major General John A Logan declared Decoration Day, the precursor to Memorial Day, to be observed May 30th, because that's when flowers would be in bloom nationwide. But the wounds from the Civil War lingered and Americans in the Confederate states consider Memorial Day a celebration for fallen Union soldiers. So they commemorated the dead at their own discretion. May 30th became a day to honor all American soldiers who gave their lives in combat when U. S. soldiers returned from World War I. Memorial Day became a national holiday in 1971, and since then Americans have celebrated the fallen military men and women through tribute, celebration, parades, and more, on the last Monday in May. 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