05/25/2026
What we now call Memorial Day was first observed on May 1, 1865, in Charleston, SC, where thousands of newly freed Black people marched, prayed and laid flowers in gratitude to the Union soldiers whose sacrifice had helped liberate them from slavery.
After the Confederates evacuated Charleston at the end of the war in April 1865, Black residents cleaned the site of a mass grave of 257 Union soldiers. The laborers dug out the bodies and gave the soldiers a proper burial.
That May 1, nearly 10,000 people, most of them formerly enslaved African-Americans, joined by union troops and northern White missionaries, gathered to dedicate the burial ground and honor the fallen.
Among the former slaves were 3,000 Black children, like those pictured here, who would become among the first African-Americans ever permitted to go to school in the South with the opening of new Freedom Schools.
https://youtu.be/l_OGD0wmM9E
The people sang and laid flowers on the gravesite. The New York Tribune described it as “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”
A tragedy that so much of our country’s true history has been withheld from us — we don’t know who we are as a nation, don’t know what we’re celebrating, don’t know how we got to where we are, and thus we don’t know how to fix what ails and divides us. It’s time that we learn our history and act upon it for the salvation of our democracy.
🙌🏿😔🎉🥰🇺🇸
