When Memorial Day was first celebrated, America was learning to be America again. More than 600,000 soldiers had fallen over four years, and the wounds had not yet healed. New-York Historical Scholar Trustee David Blight speaks about a Memorial Day celebration that took place on May 1, 1865. That day, Black workmen went to the site of an outdoor Confederate prison and in Charleston, South Carolina, and reburied the dead Union soldiers that had been left in a mass grave. They built a high fence around the property to protect the site, then joined with white missionaries and teachers in a march of 10,000 around the grounds. Trustee Blight believes this event-which he discovered during the course of archival research-to have been the earliest Memorial Day, founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. This followed a war that had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic and is a riveting story of true patriotism.
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