Refreshing our memory of the origins of the Memorial Day holiday
20th May 2024 · 0 Comments
On Memorial Day, the president of the United States of America traditionally lays a wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier.
As we pay homage to America’s military heroes this Memorial Day (May 27), let’s embrace the truth about the celebration’s origin: Black freedmen and women held the first commemoration for Black Union soldiers lost in battle.
On May 1, 1865, a parade to honor the Union war dead took place here. The event marked the earliest celebration of what became known as Memorial Day. The crowd numbered in the thousands, with African-American schoolchildren from newly formed Freedmen’s Schools leading the parade. They were followed by church leaders, freed people, Unionists, and members of the 54th Mass., 34th and 104th U.S. Colored Infantries. The dead were later reinterred in Beaufort.
In February 1865, when Confederate soldiers withdrew from Charleston after the Union had bombarded it with offshore cannon fire for more than a year and began to cut off supply lines, confederate leaders surrendered the city to the Union army.
Residents of the town found the graves of more than 250 Union soldiers buried without coffins behind the judge’s stand of the Washington Race Course. The Charleston horse track had been converted into an outdoor prison for captured Northerners.
In April, about two dozen of Charleston’s freedmen volunteered to disinter the bodies and rebury them in rows of marked graves, surrounded by a wooden, freshly whitewashed fence, according to newspaper accounts from the time.
However, for all the courageous deeds of the Black soldiers and residents of South Carolina, white abolitionists, and members of other all-Black regiments, their creation and implementation of the first Decoration Day, a.k.a. Memorial Day, are seemingly confined to the dustbin of history.
Whites have a history of cultural appropriation when it comes to Black culture. They copy Black clothing trends, dances, music and slang, and some go to extremes to look – even going under the knife – talk and act like Black people.
So, it was not surprising that whites were credited with the origin of Decoration Day or Memorial Day.
In its official publication about the “Origin of Memorial Day,” the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs neglected even to mention the forerunner event: “On May 5, 1868, the head of an organization of Union veterans – the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) – established “Decoration Day,“ as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. Maj. Gen. John A. Logan declared that Decoration Day should be observed on May 30. It is believed that the date was chosen because flowers would bloom nationwide.
That year, the first large observance was held at Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.
The ceremonies centered around the mourning-draped veranda of the Arlington mansion, once the home of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Various Washington officials, including Gen. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant, presided over the ceremonies. Flowers were strewn on both Union and Confederate graves. The activities of that commemoration mirrored the South Carolina event, down to the singing of hymns and patriotic songs. Except, in South Carolina, only Union soldiers were honored.
When the VA failed to mention the South Carolina commemoration as the first, it erased the true origins of the event from history. What’s more, the VA Department made sure to say that both Union and Confederate graves were decorated at what it called the “first large observance.”
Memorial Day was made an official federal holiday by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966.
Donald Beaulieu’s excellently researched “Black people may have started Memorial Day. Whites erased it from history” in The Washington Post sets the record straight about Memorial Day’s origin.
“Memorial Day was started by former slaves on May 1, 1865, in Charleston, SC, 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. They then held a parade of 10,000 people led by 2,800 Black children, where they marched, sang, and celebrated.”
It was “a kind of erasure from public memory,” David Blight, a history professor at Yale University, told The Washington Post of blatant efforts to leave out the South Carolina event when discussing the origins of the holiday.
Robert Gould Shaw of the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry Regiment led the 54th. The son of prominent abolitionists, Shaw had already seen combat and been wounded at the Battle of Antietam.
Through their heroic, yet tragic, assault on Battery Wagner, South Carolina, in July 1863, the 54th helped inspire the enlistment of more than 180,000 Black soldiers…a boost in morale and manpower that Lincoln recognized as essential to the victory of the United States and the destruction of slavery throughout the country, according to the National Park Service.
In early June 1863, the 54th Massachusetts arrived in Beaufort, South Carolina. On July 18, Shaw and the 54th attacked Battery Wagner, a Confederate stronghold guarding Charleston Harbor.
Shaw knew that many whites lacked confidence in the ability of the Black soldiers to fight bravely. Centuries of negative perceptions of enslaved people still hung in the air like a funeral shroud. Abolitionists in the North made gains in striving for diversity, equality, and inclusion.
Interestingly, today, we are fighting the same battle.
Knowing this battle would prove vital to shaping public opinion about the use of Black soldiers, Shaw told his men “’how the eyes of thousands would look upon the night’s work,” Douglas R. Egerton wrote in Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America.
While they fought gallantly, Shaw and more than 270 soldiers of the 54th regiment were killed, wounded, captured, and/or missing and presumed dead of the 650 men who participated in the battle, Egerton wrote in “Thunder at the Gates.”
“The splendid 54th is cut to pieces,” Lewis Douglass, a soldier of the 54th, wrote in a letter on July 20, 1863, to his father, famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The letter was published in “Freedom’s Journey: African American Voices of the Civil War.”
Harriet Tubman, witnessing the battle from a distance, remembered: “And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns, and then we heard the Thunder, and that was the big guns, and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was the dead that we reaped.”
As we celebrate Memorial Day, we must honor the courageous men from New Orleans and Louisiana who fought for our freedom.
In the fall of 1862, New Orleans raised three Union regiments of African Americans: the First, Second, and Third Louisiana Native Guard. These regiments were the first Black men to fight against Confederate troops and were the only Union regiment with Black officers and soldiers. The squadrons were later re-designated as the Corps d’Afrique and then split into multiple USCT regiments, becoming the 73rd, 74th and 75th United States Colored Infantry (USCI).
Thanks to a cadre of citizens under the banner of Take ‘Em Down NOLA, the city leaders removed at least four monuments and statues glorifying the Confederacy.
We are also grateful to several legislators who removed Robert E. Lee Day and Confederate Memorial Day from the state’s official holiday calendar in 2022.
Rep. Matthew Willard and fellow legislative co-authors Mandie Landry, Cedric Glover, Regina Ashford Barrow, Gerald Boudreaux, Joseph Bouie, Gary Carter, Patrick Connick, Katrina Jackson-Andrews, Jay Luneau, and Ed Price joined forces to clear the calendar of events honoring traitors to this great nation.
However, any civil rights leader will tell you that the struggle for diversity, equality, and inclusion is never-ending.
This article originally published in the May 20, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
