Opinion | HayesBrown: Why must we tack sales onto what could be one of our country’s most reflective days? There are just so many other days of the year for that. - MSNBCDaily
about the day’s long-forgotten origins in South Carolina. After white Confederate soldiers had abandoned the city of Charleston, formerly enslaved Black residents took over a racetrack that had served as an open-air prison:
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. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”
In the years after, this first Memorial Day was forgotten. In its place, communities throughout the North and South alike paid tribute to the war-dead in what was known as “Decoration Day,” for the act of laying flowers on the graves of the fallen. As often happens, eventually the day lost some of its macabre overtones, giving way to more celebratory holiday traditions like picnics and baseball games.