by Daniel Johnson
May 25, 2026
One of the earliest known Memorial Day celebrations dates back to formerly enslaved people and white missionaries in Charleston, South Carolina.
One of the earliest known Memorial Day celebrations dates back to formerly enslaved people and white missionaries in Charleston, South Carolina.
According to reports in the New York Tribune and the Charleston Courier, on May 1, 1865, 3,000 black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and sang “John Brown’s Body” while members of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment and other Black Union regiments performed double-time marches and black clergymen recited verses from the Bible.
In 1996, David Blight, a Harvard researcher, attempted to verify news reports, but when he contacted the Avery Institute of Afro-American History and Culture at the College of Charleston, he was told that he had not actually read the very reports he had just uncovered, according to History.
“‘I’ve never heard of it,’ they told me,” Blight said. “That never happened.”
He continued: “This was a story that had really been suppressed in both local and national memory. But no one who saw it could ever have forgotten it.”
Blight’s suspicions were confirmed when, after a talk he gave at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 2001 about his book “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” an older black woman approached him to discuss his talk.
“You mean this story is true?” the woman asked him. “I grew up in Charleston and my grandfather would always tell us the story of a parade at the old race track and we never knew whether to believe him or not. Do you think that’s true?”
History catches up with Blight, according to a report by KVTB7, the US National Park Service now has a website dedicated to the day, although when the federal government first declared Memorial Day a holiday, it ignored the celebration that prominently features Black Americans.
Regardless of which origin story the United States government honored, it became a lifelong tradition for Black Civil War veterans to honor fallen compatriots, fellow soldiers of the War Between the States.
According to the US National Park Service, the story of a black soldier, Joseph Clovese, illustrates this point.
“Joseph Clovese was born into slavery on a Louisiana plantation in January 1844. He escaped in 1862 and served as an infantryman in the 63rd United States Colored Infantry. Clovese was one of only six members of the GAR healthy enough to attend the organization’s final reunion in 1949,” the entry reads.
Today, the holiday has expanded to honor those who died in military service in all wars, but the origin of the holiday was the Civil War, which gave this original celebration additional meaning, according to Blight.
“It is the fact that this took place in Charleston, in a cemetery for the Union dead in a city where the Civil War had begun,” Blight told History, “and that it was organized and carried out by former African-American slaves, that gives it so much explosiveness.”
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