This history was buried and lost just a few decades after the Civil War. Historian David Blight recovered the story in the the late 1990s.

During the final years of the Civil war, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club in Charleston, South Carolina was turned into a prison camp for captured Union soldiers. During the seven months it existed, 257 Union prisoners died there due to exposure, disease, and starvation while held in the open-air field. The dead were buried without coffins in a mass grave near the grandstand.

In April 1865, twenty-eight newly-free African American men, members of the “Patriotic Association of Colored Men,” proceeded to the old race track. They worked for ten days. During that time they dug a grave for each dead soldier. They reinterred the bodies, placing them in individual plots with a headstone for each grave.

The Patriotic Association men constructed a high white-washed fence around the graves to protect them. They built an archway over the entrance to graveyard. On the arch, in black letters with a black border on a white ground, they painted, “Martyrs of the Race-Course.”

On May Day 1865, over ten thousand African Americans gathered to pay their respect. Three thousand Black children from the freedmen’s schools carried flowers and led the way, forming a procession nearly two miles long. As the children proceeded through the city, they sang the John Brown Song.

A society of 300 Black women, also called the Patriotic Association, carried baskets of flowers, wreaths, and crosses. The women followed the children. Next came the Mutual Aid Society, a benevolent association of Black men, carrying their bright bouquets. Following the men were many other citizens with floral tributes. Passing under the archway in silence, the children and others placed flowers on the soldiers’ graves. Speeches, Bible readings, hymns and double-time marches by Black Union regiments followed. The New York Daily Tribune reported that at the end of the day, “. . .when all had left…the tops, the sides, and the spaces between them — were one mass of flowers, not a speck of earth could be seen…[this was] a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before…” This was the first Memorial Day.

Sources:

Amanda Kerr, “Memorial Day Uncovered: Charleston’s ‘Martyrs of the Race Course,’ The College Today: The Official News Site of the College of Charleston, May 29, 2017. https://today.cofc.edu/2017/05/29/memorial-day-history/

Leah Henderson, A Day for Rememberin’: Inspired by the True Events of the First Memorial Day, New York: Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2021.

“Honor to Our Martyrs,” New York Daily Tribune, May 13, 1865.

“Monument to the Martyrs of the Race Course,” New York Daily Tribune, May 2, 1865.

“American Experience: Memorial Day,” PBS. See https://www.pbs.org/video/abolitionists-memorial-day/

David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.