Edited for posting: Memorial Day was born out of necessity. After the American Civil War, a battered United States was faced with the task of burying and honoring the 600,000 to 800,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who had died in the single bloodiest military conflict in American history. Several towns and cities across America claim to have observed their own earlier versions of Memorial Day or âDecoration Dayâ as early as 1866. (The earlier name is derived from the fact that decorating graves was and remains a central activity of Memorial Day.) But it wasnât until a remarkable discovery in a dusty Harvard University archive the late 1990s that historians learned about a Memorial Day commemoration organized by a group of freed black slaves less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865. . Back in 1996, David Blight, a professor of American History at Yale University, was researching a book on the Civil War when curator at Harvardâs Haughton Library asked if he wanted to look through two boxes of unsorted material from Union veterans. âThere was a file labeled âFirst Decoration Day,ââ remembers Blight, still amazed at his good fortune. âAnd inside on a piece of cardboard was a narrative handwritten by an old veteran, plus a date referencing an article in The New York Tribune. That narrative told the essence of the story that I ended up telling in my book, of this march on the race track in 1865.ââ . When Charleston fell and Confederate troops evacuated the badly damaged city, freed slaves remained. One of the first things those emancipated men and women did was to give the fallen Union prisoners a proper burial. They exhumed the mass grave and reinterred the bodies in a new cemetery with a tall whitewashed fence inscribed with the words: âMartyrs of the Race Course.â . #memorialday #freedslaves #slaves #blacklivesmatter#wefight #weresist #wewillwin #outfittingtherevolution #deconstructtheconstruct #blackonblackbk #itslifeordeathforus #blacketyblack #blackonblackbk #blackskin #blacknose #blacklips #blackhair #blackeverything #blackmagician #blaaaaacknificent #blackpower #blackpride #supportblackbusiness #supportblackart (at Bedford-Stuyvesant) https://www.instagram.com/p/CeLzuRZO47s/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
