It happened in Charleston, South Carolina, in the first spring of emancipation. On May 1, 1865, ten thousand Black men, women, and children gathered at the old Washington Race Course, a once-opulent symbol of antebellum wealth that the Confederacy had turned into a prison camp for Union soldiers.
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Image: April 1865 photo of the graves of Union soldiers buried at the race course-turned-Confederate-prison where historians believe the first Memorial Day took place. Library of Congress.

They gathered not to celebrate a battle or to protest an injustice, but to bury the dead. In the waning weeks of the war, 257 Union prisoners had died there—of disease, of neglect, of despair—and been cast into a mass grave behind the grandstand. Now, the people who had once been enslaved came to raise them up.
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Image: Frances Benjamin Johnston, Students Saluting the Flag at the Whittier Primary School, circa 1899-1900.

They came with roses. With sermons. With songs. With schoolchildren—three thousand of them, marching in lines, each bearing a flower, each humming or singing the old abolitionist hymn, “John Brown’s Body.” Black pastors led prayers. Black troops stood in salute.
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Image: The plaque in Hampton Park commemorating the first Memorial Day was dedicated in 2010.

A wooden arch was built above the burial ground, and across it, in bold lettering, someone had painted: Martyrs of the Race Course. And then, after hours of solemn ritual and music and testimony, the graves were decorated. They were not left bare again.
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Image: Memorial Market in Hampton Park, Charleston, South Carolina

It was, as one newspaper would later write, “a procession of friends and mourners such as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.” But it was more than a procession. It was a declaration. A statement of historical authorship.
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Image: A sketch of Union Cemetery–today Hampton Park –appeared in Harper’s Weekly magazine on May 18, 1867.

For the Black citizens of Charleston—newly freed, barely weeks into their emancipation—had laid claim not just to the bodies in those graves, but to the memory of the war itself. They had buried the Union dead with honor. And in so doing, they had given birth to what would one day be called Memorial Day.
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Image: Black American laborer between 1861-1865, known as contraband. These men worked as teamsters for the Union army.