I learned something new today. Funny when you google the origins of Memorial Day this story is almost hard to find. The AI summary is void of any mention. Ten negro soldiers, unwilling to see their fellow fallen negro soldiers entombed in a mass grave, volunteered their time and effort to excavate the mass grave and hold a proper ceremony for their fallen brothers. I'd bet my house that this story is nowhere to be found in the official records these days If I could pay a hacker to post this across the military websites I would. Seems like a story that needs to be retold The Forgotten Black History of How Memorial Day Started | TIME The work of honoring the dead began right away all over the country, and several American towns claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day. Researchers have traced the earliest annual commemoration to women who laid flowers on soldiers’ graves in the Civil War hospital town of Columbus, Miss., in April 1866. But historians like the Pulitzer Prize winner David Blight have tried to raise awareness of freed slaves who decorated soldiers’ graves a year earlier, to make sure their story gets told too. According to Blight’s 2001 book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, a commemoration organized by freed slaves and some white missionaries took place on May 1, 1865, in Charleston, S.C., at a former planters’ racetrack where Confederates held captured Union soldiers during the last year of the war. At least 257 prisoners died, many of disease, and were buried in unmarked graves, so black residents of Charleston decided to give them a proper burial. In the approximately 10 days leading up to the event, roughly two dozen African American Charlestonians reorganized the graves into rows and built a 10-foot-tall white fence around them. An archway overhead spelled out “Martyrs of the Race Course” in black letters. About 10,000 people, mostly black residents, participated in the May 1 tribute, according to coverage back then in the Charleston Daily Courier and the New York Tribune. Starting at 9 a.m., about 3,000 black schoolchildren paraded around the race track holding roses and singing the Union song “John Brown’s Body,” and were followed by adults representing aid societies for freed black men and women. Black pastors delivered sermons and led attendees in prayer and in the singing of spirituals, and there were picnics. James Redpath, the white director of freedman’s education in the region, organized about 30 speeches by Union officers, missionaries and black ministers. Participants sang patriotic songs like “America” and “We’ll Rally around the Flag” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In the afternoon, three white and black Union regiments marched around the graves and staged a drill.
just trying to blow MAGA mind knowing the memorial day is a DEI event appropriated from the negro population of civil war america Someone needs to point it out to Hege so he can cancel Memorial Day actually just found it interesting, though others might too
Do you guys know why Memorial Day is held on the 4th Monday and not the 1st Monday like Labor Day? Because, for most of the country, it gives the flowers more time to bloom so that they may be placed on the graves of the fallen.
