Before there was Memorial Day as we know it now – cookouts with Frankie Beverly and Maze playing – there was a group of Black Charlestonians who held the first celebration in honor of the Black lives lost during the Civil War.
As the war came to an end, Black Union soldiers who had been captured and then left to die were tossed into mass graves at a race course converted into a Confederate prison. But a group of formerly enslaved Black people dug up nearly 300 bodies, determined to create proper burial sites for their people.
Just three weeks after the defeat of the Confederate South, on May 1, 1865, a group of 10,000 people – mainly the formerly enslaved – gathered in what would become the country's first official "Memorial Day" parade.
In honor of the “Martyrs of the Race Course,” our ancestors laid flowers, sang hymns, Black pastors delivered sermons, and they barbecued too. But this painful and damning truth isn’t the version of Memorial Day that whites wanted. So they rewrote history.
We have always been each other’s business. And especially right now, we must act like it. We must care about what’s happening to Black people everywhere. Start here: Use the Black Farmers Index to find the Black farmers in your community and buy from them.