Episode 45: African Americans and The First Memorial Day Celebration

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Episode 45: African Americans and The First Memorial Day Celebration

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African Americans and The First Memorial Day Celebration Memorial Day, the USCT, and the Black Americans Who Remembered First Do you know the story of African Americans and The First Memorial Day Celebration. There are some graves America remembers with marble, flags, and ceremony.And then there are others. Graves that began as trenches. Bodies placed quickly into the earth. Names unspoken. Families never notified. No proper prayer. No final honor. No mother, wife, child, or loved one standing close enough to say goodbye. For many Black soldiers who served in the Civil War, death did not always bring dignity. Even after fighting for the Union, even after risking their lives for a country still deciding whether it would recognize their humanity, many were buried without ceremony, without markers, and without the honor they had earned. But history has a way of waiting. It waits beneath the soil. It waits in old newspaper clippings. It waits in family stories passed down when official records fall silent. And in Charleston, South Carolina, in the spring of 1865, newly freed African Americans did something extraordinary. They remembered. They took a place of suffering, a former racetrack turned Confederate prison camp, and transformed it into sacred ground. Today on Quarter Miles Travel, we uncover the overlooked Black history of Memorial Day, the United States Colored Troops, and the freed men, women, and children who insisted that the soldiers who died for Union and liberty would not be forgotten. The Civil War was America’s deadliest conflict. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died, and about two-thirds of those deaths came not from bullets, but from disease. The country was broken. Families were shattered. Towns were emptied of sons. And across the South, the war did more than destroy buildings and battle lines, it shook the foundation of slavery itself. For enslaved people, the Civil War was not simply a war between North and South. It was a war that opened a door. A dangerous door, yes but one that led toward freedom. As Union forces moved through Southern states, enslaved men, women, and children made life-changing decisions. Some fled plantations. Some followed Union troops. Some entered contraband camps. Some joined the army. Some searched for relatives who had been sold away. And some simply tried to survive long enough to see what freedom might become. And then came the United States Colored Troops – the USCT. Black men enlisted to fight for the Union at a time when the country still refused to treat them as equals. They wore the uniform. They carried the flag. They faced Confederate bullets, disease, discrimination, and the knowledge that if captured, they could be treated far worse than white soldiers. They were fighting for the Union. But they were also fighting for something deeper. They were fighting for freedom with their bodies, their courage, and their names. In Charleston, South Carolina, during the final year of the war, Confederate forces turned the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into a makeshift prison camp for captured Union soldiers. It had once been a place of leisure and wealth — a racetrack connected to the world of planters and privilege. But during the war, it became a place of suffering. At least 257 Union prisoners died there, many from disease and exposure. Their bodies were buried quickly in unmarked graves near the racetrack. No proper ceremony. No lasting dignity. Just a mass grave behind the grandstands. Then Charleston fell. The Confederate army evacuated the city. And the people who remained included thousands of newly freed African Americans — men, women, and children who understood exactly what those Union soldiers represented. To them, these were not nameless bodies. These were men who had died in a war that helped destroy slavery. So the freed people of Charleston acted. In the days leading up to May 1, 1865, roughly two dozen African American Charlestonians went to the site. They reinterred the bodies. They placed the graves in proper rows. They built a ten-foot-high white fence around the burial ground. Over the entrance, they placed words that still carry power: “Martyrs of the Race Course.” That phrase said everything. Created by a group called Friends of the Martyrs – A group of two dozen recently freed slaves who spent two weeks exhuming and reburying the bodies. And along with a group called the Patriotic Association of Colored Men They knew these soldiers had not simply died. They had died for something. Both groups helped exhume these brave soldiers and form a committee to honor their service and their lives with ceremony. On May 1, 1865, about 10,000 people gathered at the old racetrack in Charleston. Most were Black residents, newly freed people, joined by some white missionaries and teachers. The ceremony began in the morning. Around 3,000 Black schoolchildren marched around the racetrack carrying flowers. Imagine that ...

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