S.C. BLACK FREEDMEN ORGANIZED FIRST MEMORIAL DAY CELEBRATION IN 1865
My man Ta-Nehisi Coates has proven once again why I always click the link to his blog over at The Atlantic when the minutia of the internet starts trending towards nothingness. Today Coates features some excerpts from a piece by Harvard historian David Blight in the New York Times that describes the first celebration of what we have now come to know as Memorial Day.
I’ve decided to include some different excerpts from the same article here on my own blog at Big Think, mostly because I grew up seventy miles from Charleston, S.C. and I am embarrassed to admit that I have never heard of this before now.
After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track [in May, 1965]. A New York
