The original Memorial Day was created by Black Americans. They called it Decoration Day.

A history lesson I wasn't taught in Texas schools. Don't let this generation grow up not knowing it.

Decoration Day was created less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered by a community that had been legally enslaved a few weeks earlier. They did this to honor of the Union soldiers who died fighting to free them.

Today is a day to remember and honor those soldiers. It’s also a day to remember the people who, with their own hands, dug those soldiers out of a mass grave behind a Confederate racetrack and gave them a proper burial when no one else would. We have spent a hundred and sixty years not naming them. We can start today.

And to everyone remembering a loved one who served, today belongs to you too. Today is a day to remember sacrifice.

What the freed people of Charleston did

In the last months of the Civil War, the Confederate army turned the Washington Race Course in Charleston into an open-air prison camp for captured Union soldiers. More than 260 of them died there from disease and exposure. The Confederates dumped their bodies in a mass grave behind the grandstand and left.

When Charleston fell, the city’s Black community organized. For two weeks, recently freed Black workmen exhumed each soldier and gave them a proper burial. They built a tall fence around the new cemetery and an archway over the entrance with the words “Martyrs of the Race Course.” They did this without a government order or funding, because no one else was going to and they felt a duty to honor the fallen.

On May 1, 1865, they held a service.

Three thousand Black schoolchildren marched first, each carrying a bouquet of flowers, singing “John Brown’s Body.” Behind them came the Black ministers, members of the famed 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, and other Black Union soldiers. Behind them came a crowd of about ten thousand. The vast majority were Black Charlestonians who had been chattel a few months earlier and were now decorating the graves of the soldiers who had died for their freedom. They sang and prayed and decorated graves with flowers. They marched in a parade around the racetrack where the fallen soldiers had been imprisoned.

It was reported in The Charleston Courier and The New York Tribune. Then it was forgotten.

How the story was buried

Our country chose a different origin story. In 1868, three years after the Charleston ceremony, the Grand Army of the Republic, a white-led Union veterans’ organization, declared May 30 a national Decoration Day. The name changed to Memorial Day in the 20th century. The Charleston ceremony, organized by freed Black people, was quietly pushed aside.

It stayed buried for more than a hundred and thirty years. Yale historian David Blight stumbled onto the story in 1996 in a dusty archive at the College of Charleston. When he called the Avery Institute of Afro-American History to ask if anyone knew about the 1865 event, no one had heard of it.

That is what suppression looks like. A slow, deliberate forgetting to erase and rewrite history. The same kind of forgetting being legislated in Texas classrooms today, where teachers are told they can be sued for telling children the truth about the country they live in.

The debt

Black Americans were brought to this country in chains and held as property for two and a half centuries. When they were finally freed (on paper) they were the first to honor the soldiers who had died for that freedom. Within a decade, their voting rights were being stripped through poll taxes, literacy tests, white primaries, and the legal and extralegal terror we now call Jim Crow. The Texas Democratic Party legally barred Black voters from its primaries from 1923 to 1944, and Texas spent years in court defending that practice. After the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and again after Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, Texas immediately looked for new ways of suppressing the same voters. SB1 in 2021 was the latest version. Black, Latino, and disabled Texans have borne the heaviest cost of every one of those decisions.

Honor isn’t a one-day event. It’s what you owe people you cannot repay.

Today we remember. Tomorrow we vote.

If you want to honor the people who built the day you have off work, don’t stop today. Teach your kids the version of this story that Texas schools are now being prohibited from telling. Support the Black-led organizations doing voting rights work in the South: the Brennan Center, the Texas Civil Rights Project, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Mi Familia Vota, and the Texas Organizing Project.

And tomorrow, vote.

Action items

Tomorrow, Tuesday May 26, is Election Day. Polls open tomorrow at 7am and close at 7pm. Find your polling place at votetexas.gov and bring an accepted photo ID. If you have moved within your county since you registered, you can still vote at your old polling place. If your registration is in question, ask for a provisional ballot and do not leave without voting. If you have already voted, take one person with you tomorrow who has not, especially someone whose vote this state has been trying to discourage. Donate to the Texas Organizing Project, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, or your local Black voter outreach group.

See y’all tomorrow.

Sources

history.com

time.com

today.cofc.edu

David Blight, Race and Reunion (Harvard, 2001)

oyez.org (Smith v. Allwright, 1944; Shelby County v. Holder, 2013)

votetexas.gov