The first Memorial Day didn’t begin with Confederate widows or small ceremonies in the white South. It began in Charleston in 1865, when 10,000 newly freed Black Americans gathered to bury Union dead abandoned in a mass grave at a former Confederate prison camp. What happened there was more than mourning. It was a declaration about freedom, memory, and who would define the meaning of the Civil War.
1/13
Image: Frances Benjamin Johnston, Saluting the Flag at the Whittier Primary School, ca 1899.

1/2 mile slow walk to get to my woods.
#photography #nature