Martyrs of the Race Course

Risky History | Episode 1: Martyrs of the Race Course

Everyone thinks they know where Memorial Day came from.

They're wrong.

The first Memorial Day was not ordered by a general. It was not created by Congress. It was not born at Arlington National Cemetery. It was created on May 1st, 1865, by freed Black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina — people who had been enslaved just weeks before — at a Confederate racetrack that had been used as a prison camp for Union soldiers.

Two dozen freed Black men spent ten days exhuming a mass grave, reburying 257 Union soldiers in individual marked graves, and building a ten-foot fence above which they placed four words: Martyrs of the Race Course. Then 10,000 people gathered — most of them formerly enslaved — led by 3,000 Black schoolchildren carrying flowers.

That was the first Memorial Day.

And for over 130 years, it was deliberately erased — buried by the Lost Cause movement, suppressed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and replaced in the official American narrative by a general's order issued three years later.

This is Episode 1 of Risky History — the podcast that goes where the history books didn't. Every episode we dig into the American stories that carry the most risk: stories involving race, power, politics, and the people who were written out of the record so others could write themselves in.

History has always been about who controls the story. We're taking it back.

Sources: David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) | History.com | Time Magazine | Zinn Education Project

Music: "Strange World" by AlexBeroza — CC BY license. Source: ccmixter.org

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You probably knew the last Monday of every May. You've seen the flags, the cookouts, maybe you watched a parade or visited a cemetery. And if someone asked you where Memorial Day came from, you might say something like, It started after the Civil War. It was a way to honor fallen soldiers. And you would be right. But here's almost what nobody tells you. The first Memorial Day was not organized by generals, it wasn't organized by politicians, it was not organized by Congress. It was organized by freed black Americans. People who had been enslaved just weeks before in Charleston, South Carolina, in the spring of 1865. And for more than a century, that story was deliberately erased. Today we are giving it back. Welcome. Segment one. The Confederacy is collapsing, and across the South, something extraordinary is happening. People are becoming free. In Charleston, South Carolina, the city where the first shots of the Civil War were fired, black men, women, and children who had been enslaved their entire lives are waking up to a different world. But Charleston is also a city of devastation. It had been battered by Union bombardment, buildings are in ruins, Confederate forces have retreated, and in the middle of the city sits a place that tells you everything you need to know about what the war had become. It was called the Washington Race Course. Before the war, it was exactly what it sounds like a horse track. A place of leisure and sport for Charleston's white elites. But during the final year of the Civil War, Confederate forces had converted it into a prison camp for captured Union soldiers. Those soldiers were held there in brutal conditions, little food, almost no medicine, packed into the infield of the track with almost no shelter. Disease tore through them. By the time Charleston fell and Confederate soldiers evacuated the city, at least 257 Union soldiers had died inside that racetrack. And they were buried in a mass grave behind the grandstands. No ceremony, no markers, no gravestones. When black Charlestonians entered that racetrack after liberation, they found those graves, and they refused, absolutely, refused to let those men stay forgotten. Segment 2. The Act of Remembrance. Here's what happened next, and I want you to sit with this because every detail matters. In the approximately 10 days leading up to May 1st, 1865, roughly two dozen freed black men went to the race course and got to work. They exhumed the mass graves carefully, deliberately, and they re-buried each soldier in individual, properly marked graves, arranged in neat rows so that every man could be seen. Then they built a ten foot tall whitewashed fence around the cemetery, and above the entrance in black lettering they placed an archway and it read Martyrs of the race course. Think about the weight of those words. These were people who had themselves been treated as property, who had been bought and sold on that very racetrack, who had been denied every form of legal recognition, personhood, and dignity in their first act of freedom, before they had housing secured, before they had food security, before they knew what their futures would even look like, they stopped. And they honored someone else's sacrifice. That is not just history, that is moral statements. And then on May 1st, 1865, three weeks after Appomattox, something even larger happened. According to two newspaper accounts discovered by historian David Blight, one in the New York Tribune and one in the Charleston Courier, an estimated 10,000 people gathered at the Washington race course. The majority were freed black residents. There were also some white missionaries and union soldiers present. 3,000 black school children led the procession. They carried bouquets of flowers, they sang John Brown's body as they walked. Members of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, one of the most celebrated Black Union regiments in the war, performed drills. Black ministers offered prayers. Spirituals were sung, speeches were given, and the graves were decorated with flowers. The war was over, and Memorial Day, the actual original, first recorded Memorial Day, had been founded by African Americans on the site of their own enslavement in honor of the men who died to end it. That is the story. Segment three, The Historian Who Found It. Now, how do we know all of this? Because for most of the 20th century, this story was not in any textbook. It wasn't taught in schools. It wasn't part of the national narrative of Memorial Day at all. It was found in a dusty archive at Harvard University in the late 1990s. The historian who found it was David Blight, a professor at Yale University, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Civil War. He came across those two newspaper accounts, the New York Tribune Report and the Charleston Curry Report, while he was researching a book on how America remembers the Civil War. He described the discovery as one of those once-in-a-career moments. His 2001 book, Race and Reunion, The Civil War and American Memory, brought this story to wider audiences for the first time. And Blight said something that I think is worth quoting directly. He said that what gives this event such poignancy is, and I'm paraphrasing, the fact that it occurred in Charleston at a cemetery for Union Dead in the city where the Civil War had begun, organized by African American former slaves. That combination, he argued, makes it one of the most remarkable civil acts in American history. Today, Charleston officially recognizes the May 1st, 1865 ceremony as the true origin of Memorial Day. So the question then becomes: if this happened and there were newspaper accounts of it at the time, why? Why did it disappear from history for over 130 years? And that's where the story gets darker. Segment 4. To understand what happened to the story, we need to talk about something called the Lost Cause. You see, after the Civil War ended, a movement emerged, primarily in the South, but with influence in the North as well, that sought to reframe the Confederacy, not as a rebellion and defense of slavery, but as a noble, honorable cause, a defense of states' rights, a tragic but defined chapter in American history. This movement was not passive, it was organized. And one of its most powerful instruments was a group called the United Daughters of the Confederacy, otherwise called the UDC. They worked aggressively throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries to shape public memory. They lobbied for Confederate monuments. They influenced how history was taught in Southern schools. They promoted textbooks that minimized or outright omitted the role of slavery in causing the Civil War. And they worked to erase the black origins of Memorial Day. Here is a specific documented example of this erasure. About 51 years after the 1865 Charleston ceremony, so approximately 1916, the president of the Ladies Memorial Association of Charleston received a letter. A United Daughters of the Confederacy official from New Orleans was asking a pointed question. Was it true that black residents of Charleston had organized a burial ceremony and parade in 1865? The response from the Ladies Memorial Association president, a woman named Mrs. S. C. Beckwith, was brief. She wrote, I regret that I was unable to gather any official information in answer to this. Now, does she know? Maybe. Maybe not. But David Blight argues that the exchange illustrates exactly how white Charlestonians suppressed from memory this founding. The response was not a denial exactly, but it was a door being closed, an erasure being confirmed. By this point, the official National Story of Memorial Day had already been rewritten around a different event and a different man. Segment 5. General Logan and the Official Story. Three years after the Charleston ceremony, in May of 1868, a man named Major General John A. Logan entered the picture. Logan was the commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a powerful organization made up of Union Civil War veterans. On May 5th, 1868, Logan issued what became known as General Order No. 11. That order designated May 30th as a National Day of Commemoration, quote, for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of the country during the late rebellion. He called it Decoration Day. The first national observance was held on May 30, 1868 at Arlington National Cemetery. Thousands attended. Ceremonies were held at 883 cemeteries across 27 states, 336 cities across 31 states held parades or orations. By 1890, every northern state had made Decoration Day an official holiday. Now Logan's order was significant. It formalized and nationalized something that communities were already doing in scattered informal ways. And we should not dismiss his role. But here is the critical point. Logan's 1868 order came three years after Charleston. It wasn't the origin, it was the institutionalization of a practice that black Americans had already begun. And yet Logan, and by extension, Arlington Cemetery became the official story. The origin story that got taught in schools, the one that ended up in encyclopedias and history textbooks. Charleston? That just disappeared. There's also something worth knowing about Logan himself. Something that adds another layer of complexity to the story. Because before the Civil War, Logan was a Democrat from Illinois who had helped pass state legislation prohibiting black people, including freedmen, from settling in Illinois. He changed positions during the war. He became a Union general and eventually a champion of veterans' rights. You see, people can change. That part of his story is real. But it is worth noting that the man who became the official founder of Memorial Day in American memory had a complicated relationship with black Americans, while the actual founders of the holiday, the free people of Charleston, were written out entirely. That is not irony. That is history. Segment six, the post-Reconstruction Erasure. After the 1865 Charleston ceremony through the period of Reconstruction, roughly 1865 to 1877, black Americans continued to play a central role in Memorial Day observances across the South. These were not just acts of remembrance, they were political acts, public assertions that black lives did matter, that black service mattered, that the Union's victory and the freedom it produced was worth commemorating. Black veterans' organizations held ceremonies, black communities built traditions, the holiday in black America carried a weight and a meaning that it is rarely carried in white America because for black Americans, it wasn't just about the dead, it was about what the dead had died for. But after 1877, after Reconstruction collapsed and Federal troops withdrew from the South, that's when everything changed. Jim Crow rose, black political participation was systematically suppressed. Black veterans were excluded from White Memorial Day ceremonies. Black organizations that had honored the dead were pushed to the margins. And the history of black Americans' founding role in the holiday was gradually, deliberately erased. Not a race by accident, not a race because people forgot, a race because certain people needed it to be gone. Because if you acknowledge that freed black Americans found in Memorial Day, that the first act in national remembrance for fallen soldiers was performed by people who had been enslaved, then you have to reckon with what that means. It means black Americans were not passive recipients of freedom. They were active moral agents from the very first moment of liberation. It means the holiday that most Americans think of as a product of political and military leadership was actually born from black grief, black love, and black civil courage. And for a movement trying to build monuments to the Confederacy and rewrite the Civil War as something other than a war about slavery, that story cannot be allowed to stand. So they buried it. For over 130 years, they succeeded. Segment 7, What It Means Today. David Blythe's work brought this story back into the light. And today the historical community broadly recognizes the May 1st, 1865 Charleston ceremony as one of, if not the earliest, Memorial Day observance in American history. Charleston officially recognizes it. Scholars have written about it, journalists have covered it, but it is still not in the standard American curriculum. It is still not the story most people hear when Memorial Day comes around. It is still not the image that comes to mind. Those 3,000 black school children carrying flowers, singing, walking around a racetrack that had once been a prison, that had once been a place of sport for enslaved peoples and slavers. That image should be iconic. It isn't, yeah. So what do we do with this? I want to be clear, this is not an argument that Memorial Day belongs to any one group. The men and women we honor on this holiday span every race, every background, every generation. Black soldiers, white soldiers, Latino soldiers, Native American soldiers, Asian soldiers, every war from the revolution to today. Memorial Day belongs to all of us, but knowing who kneeled at those graves, who first laid the flowers, who first built the fence, who first gave those anonymous men their names back, that changes something. It changes the story. And here is where I believe you cannot truly honor the dead if you are not willing to erase the people who first honored them. The freed people of Charleston did not have to do what they did. They were free, barely. They had their own survival to think about, their own grief, their own futures to build from, nothing. And their first act was to make sure that soldiers who died for their freedom were seen. That is the origin of Memorial Day. Not a general's order, not a politician's speech, not a ceremony at Arlington Cemetery. It was them. As we come out of this Memorial Day and think of the next, whether about a cookout, visiting a cemetery, watching a parade, or just sitting quietly, I want you to carry that image with you. A racetrack in Charleston, South Carolina, graves in neat rows, a white fence with the words, Martyrs of the Race Course, written above the gate. 3,000 children carrying flowers, 10,000 people gathered to say, We remember, we see you, you matter. That happened on May 1st, 1865, and the people who made it happen were free for less than a month. Thank you for listening to episode one of Risky History. If this story moved you, share it. Send it to someone who doesn't know it. The best way to fight erasure is telling the truth loudly and often. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 19:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Noises in the air, yeah, the signal is weak. I'm searching for a truth that nobody wants to speak. I wake up in a fever, staring at the blue light, scrolling through a billion souls, screaming in the night. They say knowledge is power. Well, I'm feeling pretty weak. Every link is a rapper hole, the outlook is bleak. Got a compass in my hand, but the needle's spinning fast. Am I supposed to build a future when I can't find a past? I'm lost in the glitches, I'm drowning in the feet. Got everything I want, but nothing that I need. Is it real? Is it fake? Is it all just a dream? A digital ghost in the physical scheme. The more that I know, the less I understand. I'm a stranger in a strange world. Sinking in the sand.