The True Story Of Memorial Day: How Newly Freed Black Charlestonians Honored Fallen Soldiers

Martie Bowser, The Black Wall Street Times

The Washington Race Course and Jockey Club in Charleston, South Carolina, once stood as a symbol of antebellum wealth and leisure. During the final year of the Civil War, Confederate forces converted it into an open-air prison camp for captured Union soldiers. At least 257 prisoners of war died there, turning the site into both a mass grave and, later, the setting for what is widely recognized as the first Memorial Day observance.

Less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered, a group of roughly two dozen Black volunteers exhumed the bodies. They reburied each man in a proper individual grave and enclosed the site with a ten-foot white fence. Above the entrance, they placed a hand-painted sign that read, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

A Procession of Freedom

On May 1, 1865, an estimated 10,000 people gathered at the site. The vast majority were newly freed Black residents of Charleston. Three thousand Black schoolchildren led the procession, carrying armfuls of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” They were followed by mutual aid societies, Black ministers who read scripture, and Union soldiers who performed military drills.

The ceremony reflected a deep sense of reverence rooted in Black spiritual and cultural traditions. It was not simply an act of mourning. It was a declaration.

Just days earlier, many of those in attendance had been considered legal property. They had no guarantees of safety, no defined rights, and no clear vision of what freedom would bring. Yet their first collective act was one of gratitude, honoring those who had died in the fight that made their freedom possible.

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