A celebration and
burial of dead soldiers held by African-Americans on May 1, 1865 on a
South Carolina burial ground was the first recorded Memorial Day,
according to Yale University history professor David Blight. Blight says
many Union soldiers were buried improperly in a burial ground that once
was a race track. After the Civil War ended, many blacks returned to
the grounds to give the fallen soldiers proper burials. “Blacks, many of
them recently freed slaves, buried the soldiers properly. They put up a
fence around the area and painted it. More than 260 were buried there.
We don’t know the names. We don’t know the race.” - David Blight
African Americans Invented Memorial DayPosted by JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor in Society, War
Click here for the original article
According
to Professor David Blight of the Yale University History Department,
the first memorial day was observed by formerly enslaved black people at
the Washington Race Course (today the location of Hampton Park) in
Charleston, South Carolina. The race course had been used as a temporary
Confederate prison camp in 1865 as well as a mass grave for Union
soldiers who died there. Immediately after the cessation of hostilities,
formerly enslaved people exhumed the bodies from the mass grave and
reinterred them properly with individual graves. They built a fence
around the graveyard with an entry arch and declared it a Union
graveyard. The work was completed in only ten days. On May 1, 1865, the
Charleston newspaper reported that a crowd of up to ten thousand, mainly
black residents, including 2800 children, proceeded to the location for
included sermons, singing, and a picnic on the grounds, thereby
creating the first "Decoration Day".
David W. Blight in
his own words from The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
lecture 19, To Appomattox and Beyond: The End of the War and a Search
for Meanings:
African-Americans
invented Memorial Day, in Charleston, South Carolina. There are three
or four cities in the United States, North and South, that claim to be
the site of the first Memorial Day, but they all claim 1866; they were
too late. I had the great, blind, good fortune to discover this story in
a messy, totally disorganized collection of veterans’ papers at the
Houghton Library at Harvard some years back. And what you have there is
black Americans, recently freed from slavery, announcing to the world,
with their flowers and their feet and their songs, what the war had been
about. What they basically were creating was the Independence Day of a
second American Revolution. That story got lost, it got lost for more
than a century. And when I discovered it, I started calling people in
Charleston that I knew in archives and libraries, including the Avery
Institute, the black research center in Charleston–”Has anybody, have
you ever heard of this story?” And no one had ever heard it. It showed
the power of the Lost Cause in the wake of the war to erase a story. But
I started looking for other sources, and lo and behold there were lots
of sources. Harper’s Weekly even had a drawing of the cemetery in an
1867 issue.
The old oval of that racetrack is still there today. If you
ever go to Charleston go up to Hampton Park. Hampton Park is today what
the racecourse was then. It’s named for Wade Hampton, the white
supremacist, redeemer, and governor of South Carolina at the end of
Reconstruction and a Confederate General during the Civil War. And that
park sits immediately adjacent to the Citadel, the Military Academy of
Charleston. On any given day you can see at any given time about 100 or
200 Citadel cadets jogging on the track of the old racecourse. There is
no marker, there’s no memento, there’s only a little bit of a memory.
Although a few years ago a friend of mine in Charleston organized a mock
ceremony where we re-enacted that event, including the children’s
choir, and they made me dress up in a top hat and a funny old nineteenth
century suit and made me get up on a podium and make a stupid speech.
But there is an effort, at least today, to declare Hampton Park a
National Historic Landmark.
What the History of Memorial Day Teaches About Honoring the War Dead
By ADAM COHEN - New York Times
Published: May 28, 2007
Memorial Day got its start after the Civil War, when freed slaves
and abolitionists gathered in Charleston, S.C., to honor Union soldiers
who gave their lives to battle slavery. The holiday was so closely
associated with the Union side, and with the fight for emancipation,
that Southern states quickly established their own rival Confederate
Memorial Day.
Over the next 50 years, though, Memorial Day
changed. It became a tribute to the dead on both sides, and to the
reunion of the North and the South after the war. This new holiday was
more inclusive, and more useful to a forward-looking nation eager to put
its differences behind it. But something important was lost: the
recognition that the Civil War had been a moral battle to free black
Americans from slavery.
In “Race and Reunion,” his masterful book
about historical memory, David Blight, a professor at Yale, tells the
wistful story of Memorial Day’s transformation — and what has been lost
as a result. War commemorations, he makes clear, do not just pay tribute
to the war dead. They also reflect a nation’s understanding of
particular wars, and they are edited for political reasons. Memorial Day
is a day not only of remembering, but also of selective forgetting — a
point to keep in mind as the Iraq war moves uneasily into the history
books.
Many of the early Memorial Day commemorations, Professor
Blight notes, were like Charleston’s, paying tribute both to the fallen
Union soldiers and to the emancipationist cause. At a ceremony in Maine
in 1869, one fiery orator declared that “the black stain of slavery has
been effaced from the bosom of this fair land by martyr blood.”
Less
than a decade later in 1877 — when Reconstruction ended in the South —
at New York City’s enormous Memorial Day celebration, there was much
talk of union, and almost none of slavery or race. The New York Herald
declared that “all the issues on which the war of rebellion was fought
seem dead,” and noted approvingly that “American eyes have a
characteristic tendency to look forward.”
There were dissenting
voices.
Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist leader, continued to
insist that Memorial Day should be about the battle between “slavery and
freedom, barbarism and civilization.” But the drive to make the holiday
a generic commemoration of the Civil War dead won out.
The new
Memorial Day made it easier for Northern and Southern whites to come
together, and it kept the focus where political and business leaders
wanted it: on national progress. But it came at the expense of American
blacks, whose status at the end of Reconstruction was precarious. If the
Civil War was not a battle to determine whether a nation “dedicated to
the proposition that all men are created equal” could “long endure,” as
Lincoln declared in the Gettysburg Address, but a mere regional dispute,
there was no need to continue fighting for equal rights.
And
increasingly the nation did not. When Woodrow Wilson spoke at Gettysburg
on the 50th anniversary of the battle, in a Memorial Day-like ceremony,
he avoided the subject of slavery, Professor Blight notes, and declared
“the quarrel” between North and South “forgotten.” The ceremony was
segregated, and a week later Wilson’s administration created separate
white and black bathrooms in the Treasury Department. It would be
another 50 years before the nation seriously took up the cause of racial
equality again.
Since 1913, Memorial Day has changed even more.
It has expanded — after World War I, it became a tribute to the dead of
all the nation’s wars — while at the same time fading. Today, Memorial
Day is little more than the start of summer, a time for barbecues and
department store sales. Much would be gained, though, by going back to
the holiday’s original meanings.
When Memorial Day began, the war
dead were placed front and center. The holiday’s original name,
Decoration Day, came from the day’s main activity: leaving flowers at
cemeteries. Today, though, we are fighting a war in which great pains
have been taken to hide the nearly 3,500 Americans who have died from
sight. The Defense Department has banned the photographing of returning
caskets, and the president refuses to attend soldiers’ funerals.
Memorial
Day also began with the conviction that to properly honor the war dead,
it is necessary to honestly contemplate the cause for which they
fought. Today we are fighting a war sold on false pretenses, and the
Bush administration stands by its false stories. Memorial Day’s history,
and its devolution, demonstrates that the instinct to prettify war and
create myths about it is hardly new.
But as the founders of the
original Memorial Day understood, the only honorable way to remember
those who have lost their lives is to commemorate them out in the open,
and to insist on a true account.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/opinion/28mon4.html?_r=0
