I hope you enjoyed the long weekend and took some time to ponder Memorial Day, which honors all those who have died serving in the U.S. military. Memorial Day traces its origins to the aftermath of the US Civil War.
I also hope you were able to attend the opening weekend of Unmasking & Evolution of Negro Election Day and the Black Vote by Salem United, Inc. at Hamilton Hall. (The exhibit runs every weekend through August 29.) Funnily enough, in looking up information about Memorial Day for a potential newsletter introduction, I came across an article on History.com about how the historian David Blight "unmasked" what may have been the first Memorial Day celebration. On May 1, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, there was a memorial at a race track where captured Union soldiers had previously been held in a makeshift, deadly prison:
According to two reports that Blight found in The New York Tribune and The Charleston Courier, a crowd of 10,000 people, mostly freed slaves with some white missionaries, staged a parade around the race track. Three thousand Black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and sang “John Brown’s Body.” Members of the famed 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments were in attendance and performed double-time marches. Black ministers recited verses from the Bible.
But in the weeks prior to that parade, African Americans in Charleston had carried out a grimmer and more arduous memorial for the Union soldiers who died in the race track prison:
When Charleston fell and Confederate troops evacuated the badly damaged city, those freed from enslavement remained. One of the first things those emancipated men and women did was to give the [more than 260] fallen Union prisoners a proper burial. 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.”
The History.com article described the 10,000 person memorial parade event as "even more extraordinary" than the creation of the proper cemetery. I am not not sure; both occurrences are stunning. And the memories of both were almost erased. Keep the memory alive now: You can read more on this College of Charleston site, where Assistant Professor of History Adam Domby offers insightful comments on the meaning of these events in the context of post-Civil War America.
Let our actions today, and every day, be a fitting memorial to those who fought for America and for freedom.
Respectfully submitted,
Judith Reilly