Memorial Day

Walt Whitman, always a man of great thought, wondered after the Civil War, what can we do with “the dead, the dead, the dead — our dead — or South or North, ours all.”

How can a country so severely battered, separated and splintered pay respect to the 625,000 who lost their life?

Many towns claim to have started Decoration Day to honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice; yet, according to Yale professor and historian David W. Blight, the honoring of the fallen began in Charleston, S.C., by former slaves and their children.

While Blight researched his book Race and Reunion at the Harvard Houghton Library, he stumbled upon a box called First Decoration Day, finding a handwritten note on cardboard with a date and reference to a parade.

According to a New York Tribune article, Blight found that former slaves and Union Soldiers gathered on the old planters’ race track, called Washington Race Course and Jockey Club. Its infield was used during the war as an open-air prison.

Roughly 260 Union solders had died on that infield from exposure and diseases — and were thrown into a mass gravesite behind the grandstand.

According to Blight: “Black Charlestonians in cooperation with White missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders' race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy's horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freed people.”

A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing "a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before."

At 9 a.m. on May 1, the procession stepped off led by 3,000 Black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing "John Brown's Body."

The children were followed by several hundred Black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came Black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other Black and White citizens.

As many as possible gathered in the cemetery enclosure; a children’s choir sang, "We'll Rally around the Flag," the "Star-Spangled Banner," and several spirituals before several ministers read from scripture.

After the parade, they did what most Americans do today. They held a picnic, played music and had a ceremony.

Once the ceremony was over, the former slaves built a fence around the gravesite, making a cemetery, and at the opening of the fence, they built an archway with an inscription posted.

“Martyrs of the Race Course.”

The story told by Blight is powerful and deserves to be remembered today as we honor the fallen.

The old racetrack is gone, but an oval roadway survives on the site in Hampton Park.

The old gravesite of the Martyrs of the Race Course is gone, too; they were reinterred in the 1880s at a national cemetery in Beaufort, S.C.

What is gone can never be forgotten, so as we honor our fallen, let’s also honor those men, women and children who demonstrated incredible kindness on May 1, 1865.

Their efforts are also something to memorialize.