05/25/2026
"Martyrs of the Race Course" ~ The Forgotten First Memorial Day
The federal government says Memorial Day was born in Waterloo, New York. History books credit General John A. Logan's 1868 proclamation. But the actual first Memorial Day — the one the nation quietly forgot — was organized by thousands of freed Black Americans in the ruins of Charleston, South Carolina, on May 1, 1865.
The story begins at the Washington Race Course, a place where Charleston's elite once gathered to watch horses run. During the final year of the Civil War, Confederates converted it into a prison camp for captured Union soldiers. Conditions were so bad that more than 250 prisoners died from disease or exposure and were buried in a mass grave behind the track's grandstand.
When the war ended and Charleston fell, the city's newly freed Black residents did something extraordinary. They exhumed the mass grave and reinterred the bodies in a new cemetery with a tall whitewashed fence inscribed with the words: "Martyrs of the Race Course."
In approximately 10 days leading up to the event, roughly two dozen Black American Charlestonians reorganized the graves into orderly rows and constructed a 10-foot-tall white fence around them.
Then on May 1, 1865, the ceremony itself unfolded. Nearly 10,000 former slaves marched onto the grounds of the old racetrack. The procession began at 9 a.m. as 2,800 Black schoolchildren marched by the graves, softly singing "John Brown's Body." Soon, their voices gave way to the sermons of preachers, then prayer — and later, picnics. They called it Decoration Day.
According to two reports found in The New York Tribune and The Charleston Courier, members of the famed 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments were in attendance and performed double-time marches around the track where their fellow soldiers had suffered and died.
The story was covered by the national press at the time — and then essentially vanished. It was rediscovered more than 130 years later by Yale historian David Blight, who found a newspaper account documenting the event in the archives of the College of Charleston's Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture. In 2001, he documented it in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.
The cemetery where that first gathering took place is no longer there — it was replaced by a park honoring a Confederate general. In a formal sense, the modern Memorial Day originated with an order issued in 1868 by Major General John A. Logan — three years after the Charleston ceremony. The federal government officially named Waterloo, New York its birthplace in 1966. But the heart of it — the flowers, the songs, the consecration of the fallen — began with people who had just been freed from bo***ge, choosing their first free act to be an act of gratitude and grief for the soldiers who died so that they might be free.
Today, all of us at CDA hope you will take a moment to reflect, honor, and remember those who stood for, and are currently serving this country. Without their services and sacrifices, we would not have the freedoms and priviledges afforded us today.
