More warming detail on the "Martyrs of the Race Course", born on May 1 1865 ..
The first known observance of a Memorial Day-type observance was in Charleston, South Carolina on May 1, 1865; freedmen (freed slaves) commemorated and celebrated at the Washington Race Course, today the location of Hampton Park. 257 Union soldiers had been buried there, and the freedmen labeled the gravesite "Martyrs of the Race Course".
In a recent lecture, David Blight, a history professor at Yale University, told the story of the first Memorial Day:
"During the last months of the [American Civil] war the Confederate Army turned the Washington race course [in Charleston, South Carolina] into an open air prison. And in that open air prison in the in-field of the horse track about 260 odd Union soldiers had died of disease and exposure. And they were buried in unmarked graves behind the grandstand of the race track. And by the way, there was no more important and symbolic site in low country planter slave holding life than their race track. The black folks of Charleston got organized. They knew about all this. They went to the site. They reinterred the buried men. They couldn’t mark them with names. They didn’t have any names. Then they made them proper graves. They built a fence around the cemetery. And over an archway they painted the inscription: “Martyrs of the Race Course.” And then on May 1, 1865 they held a parade of 10,000 people on the race track led by 3,000 black children carrying arms full of roses singing John Brown’s Body. As many as could fit got into the gravesite. Five black preachers read from scripture. A children’s choir sang the national anthem, America the Beautiful[sic] , and several spirituals. And then they broke from that and did what essentially you or I do on Memorial Day: They ran races, listened to speeches, the troops marched back and forth, and they held picnics. This was the first Memorial Day. African-Americans invented Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina. What you have there is black Americans recently freed from slavery announcing to the world with their flowers, 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.”
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