Memorial Day- Its black roots

The first nationally recognized Memorial Day was held at Arlington National Cemetery on May 30, 1868, but the “First Decoration Day” was held three years earlier in 1865 at the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club in Charleston, South Carolina. Earlier in the Civil War, the club was made into a Confederate controlled prison that housed over 260 Union troops who by 1865 had tragically died from exposure and disease. Preceding the fall of the City of Charleston, Confederate troops quickly buried these soldiers in a mass grave behind the stands before fleeing the city, leaving behind huge numbers of newly freed slaves. David Blight, a professor of American History at Yale University, in his groundbreaking research noted the immediate humanitarian efforts of the newly freed slaves: “One of the first things those emancipated men and women did was to give the fallen Union prisoners a proper burial. They exhumed the mass grave and reinterred the bodies in a new cemetery with a tall whitewashed fence inscribed with the words: ‘Martyrs of the Race Course’… then on May 1, 1865, something even more extraordinary happened… a crowd of 10,000 people, mostly freed slaves with some white missionaries, staged a parade around the race track. Three thousand black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and sang ‘John Brown’s Body.’ Members of the famed 54th Massachusetts and other black Union regiments were in attendance and performed double-time marches. Black ministers recited verses from the Bible.”[1] Following this historic event, the African American dominated crowd took part in what is now viewed as common Memorial Day traditions. In addition to the parade, “they enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches, and watched soldiers drill.”[2]

The late Chicago educator Frances T. Matlock (1907 - 2002) recalled: “May the 30th, Decoration Day, we called it back in those days… my mother took us to see all of them. We would be leaving home early and get downtown and sit down in front of the Art Institute [of Chicago, Illinois] and sit on the curb and watch until the parade started. We'd be running out there to look and see if the parade started.”[5] Newspaper editor Gale Horton Gay (1954 - ) also described some of her memories of Memorial Day: “... the parade in Mount Vernon [New York] would pass by our block. And, I remember… hearing the bands coming down the street and thinking, Oh, I gotta get outside the parade's coming, you know. But, it would pass right in front of the house… and, you know, your friends are playing in the band…”[6] But not all memories were pleasant. Famed actor Robert Guillaume (1927 - 2017) noted one memory of the Memorial Day parade in St. Louis, Missouri: "a group of white guys would get into a fire truck and come through our neighborhoods, and their idea of fun was to throw garbage from those trucks at us--at the kids who might be following the truck."[7]