"Memorial Day Began with Black Freedom: A Truth We Must Remember"
Courtesy Hashim Coates
Today, we honor Memorial Day, a sacred time to remember those who laid down their lives in service to the United States. Their sacrifice commands not only our gratitude but also our commitment to the values of justice, peace, and freedom they fought to defend. This day calls us to reflect not just on military valor but on the full complexity of memory, loss, and the struggle for dignity.
What is often left out of our national narrative is that Memorial Day traces its earliest roots to a community of newly freed Black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina. In the spring of 1865, as the Civil War came to a close, the city’s Washington Race Course had been used by the Confederacy as a prison camp. Hundreds of Union soldiers died there from disease and neglect, buried hastily in a mass grave.
The Black residents of Charleston, many of whom had been enslaved in the region, refused to let those lives be forgotten. In an act of profound care and defiance, they reinterred the soldiers’ remains in proper graves, built an archway inscribed with “Martyrs of the Race Course,” and organized a procession of more than 10,000 people. It was a ceremony of honor, mourning, and reclamation, a radical declaration that every life lost in the pursuit of freedom deserved remembrance.
This moment, now known as the first widely recognized observance of what would become Memorial Day, reminds us that the fight for freedom has always been deeply intertwined with Black history. The people who were once denied the rights of citizenship were among the first to enshrine the sacred duty of national remembrance.
As we honor those who served, let us also tell the whole truth. Let us remember the sacrifice, the struggle, and the unsung beginnings. We carry that memory with gratitude and purpose.
Read more on Memorial Day:
David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001)
NPR: "Freed Slaves Honored Fallen Soldiers in a Way We Never Knew"
As we honor those who served, let us also tell the truth. Let us remember the sacrifice, the struggle, and the unsung beginnings. We carry that memory with gratitude and purpose.
