THE FIRST MEMORIAL DAY

I graduated high school thirty years ago. I consider myself someone who pays attention. I have followed history, politics, and current events my entire adult life. I interned at political think tanks. I have read more books about this country than I can count.

I did not know this story until this week.

That is not an accident. And that is the point.

They say the winners get to write the history books. So with that knowledge I guess we now know who actually won.

You hear the phrase in movies and on the History Channel. This could rewrite history. We say it like rewriting history is some distant future possibility. Some academic exercise. Some dramatic moment still to come.

It already happened. They already rewrote it. They just rewrote it in the wrong direction and called it the original.

It is time to rewrite it back. With the truth this time.

Here is what they did not teach us in school.

On May 1st 1865, ten thousand people gathered at a former Confederate racetrack in Charleston, South Carolina. Three thousand of them were Black schoolchildren carrying roses, singing John Brown's Body. Black ministers delivered sermons. Black Union regiments performed drills. The crowd laid flowers on the graves of two hundred and fifty seven Union soldiers who had died as prisoners of war and been buried in unmarked mass graves by the retreating Confederate army.

In the ten days before that parade, roughly two dozen Black Charlestonians had quietly reorganized those graves into orderly rows, built a ten foot tall white fence around them, and inscribed an archway with the words Martyrs of the Race Course.

These were people who had been enslaved weeks earlier. They organized the first Memorial Day. They did it to honor the men who died so they could be free.

Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Blight found this story in a dusty collection of veterans papers at Harvard in the late 1990s. It had been lost for more than a century. The story got lost, he said, it got lost for more than a century.

It did not get lost by accident.

After Reconstruction ended and white Southerners reclaimed power they reinterpreted Memorial Day as a holiday of reconciliation marking sacrifices on both sides. The African American origins were suppressed. Hampton Park named after Confederate General Wade Hampton replaced the original site. The graves were reinterred elsewhere in the 1880s.

The people who invented the holiday had their names removed from it. The holiday that freed Black Americans created to honor the men who died for their freedom was repackaged as a celebration of Confederate sacrifice too.

Then this weekend a president stood at Arlington National Cemetery on the holiday those freed slaves invented and delivered a speech that departed from every tradition of the day to praise his Defense Secretary and attack the previous administration.

The man who wants to remove Black history from American classrooms stood on ground made sacred by Black Americans and used it as a campaign backdrop.

The winners get to write the history books.

Now you know who actually won.

The first Memorial Day was organized by people who had just escaped slavery to honor the soldiers who died for their freedom. They built the fence. They laid the flowers. They sang the hymns. They started the tradition.

And then someone whitewashed the fence and put a different name on the gate.

I am fifty something years old. I should not be learning this for the first time this week.

Neither should you.

Start looking at the origins of everything. Not just holidays. Everything. The rewriting already happened. It is time to rewrite it back with the truth this time.

To the countless men and women who sacrificed their lives defending our rights, thank you. I pray that it will never be done in vain.

The pattern is this consistent. — Barron St. John, The Decoder Ring