https://www.lx.com/black-legacy/dont-overlook-memorial-days-black-southern-roots/53453/
Hampton Park, Charleston, South Carolina - a cemetary, birthplace of Decoration Day or Dedication Day, finally Memorial Day. It first took place on May 1st, 1865.
Formerly enslaved were entrusted with basically the "clean up" in the area after the Civil War. They unearthed a mass grave of Black Union soldiers and honored them properly - proper preparation of the remains for burial, the tidy alignment of individual graves and finally the re-burying of the dead with dignity. Many cities celebrated this remembrance but Charleston had them beat by about 100 years!
This act was a way of the ex-enslaved thanking the men who'd died fighting for the Union and it also was a dig at the defeated Confederacy.. Needless to say, the custom did not sit right with white Charlestonians. They clung to the the myth of the "Lost Cause" - a re-telling of the Civil War which casts the South in the role of the loer because the North had more manpower and resources. It explained that the war happened because the North was jealous of a paradisical antebellum South. its kindly slave holders, and "happily enslaved darkies." The "Lost Cause" never mentioned the brutality of chattel slavery as a cause for the Civil War. The theory is a doozy - https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lost-Cause
Anyhoo, the origins of Memorial Day are not discussed even today. One must research it to discover the true origins.
Whatevs.
Today, I salute 3 of my uncles who served in WW2, and my father and 1 aunt who were in the Navy.
Happy Memorial Day and thank you.
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