INSTITUTE INDEX: The Southern roots of Memorial Day
The burial ground for Union prisoners who died at a Confederate work camp in Charleston, South Carolina. Formerly enslaved people dug individual graves for the dead and held a procession to honor them that was known as "Decoration Day," which foreshadowed Memorial Day. (Photo from the Library of Congress website.)
Year in which former slaves in Charleston, South Carolina, held a funeral procession to honor Union soldiers who died in a local Confederate prison camp: 1865
Number of people who took part in the May 1 procession, called Decoration Day, held after the freedmen dug individual graves for the soldiers, who had been buried en masse: nearly 10,000
Number of African-American children who marched past the graves, strewing flowers and softly singing "John Brown's Body" and "The Star-Spangled Banner": 2,800
Number of Union graves dug at the camp, which was a race course before the war: 257
Number of members of Friends of the Martyrs and the Patriotic Association of Colored Men who dug the graves: 24
Years later that Waterloo, New York, celebrated a similar version of Decoration Day, which has often been wrongly credited with starting the Memorial Day tradition: 1
Year in which Memorial Day was officially proclaimed for May 30 by Gen. John Logan, national commander of a Union veterans group called the Grand Army of the Republic: 1868
Year in which a separate Confederate Memorial Day tradition began in the South: 1868
Date on which Texas honors the Confederate war dead: 1/19
Date for Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi: 4/26
For Louisiana and Tennessee: 6/3
Year by which Memorial Day was recognized by all of the Northern states, though the South refused until the holiday was broadened after World War One from honoring just the Civil War dead to those soldiers who died in all U.S. wars: 1890
Year when, out of concern that Americans were forgetting the true meaning Memorial Day, the Clinton White House created the National Moment of Remembrance: 2000
Time on Memorial Day at which Americans are asked to pause and consider the true meaning of the holiday: 3 p.m.
(Click on figure to go to source.)
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Sue Sturgis
Sue is the editorial director of Facing South and the Institute for Southern Studies.