African Americans and the Making of Memorial Day

"Louisiana furnished 24,000 Black men to help put down the rebellion. You talk about strewing flowers upon the graves of our departed Comrades. Who are the ones that do it down South but the Black people?"
— Comrade Boyle of Louisiana, at a national gathering of the Grand Army of the Republic, 1907

Origins

In April 1901, at the dedication of the General John A. Logan Memorial in Washington, speakers including President William McKinley and New York Senator Chauncey Depew credited Logan's General Order No. 11 of 1868, which made the decoration of graves on Memorial Day — also called Decoration Day — an annual custom. Historians still debate where and when the first Memorial Day was held, but one of the earliest recorded observances undoubtedly took place in Charleston, South Carolina, as the Civil War was ending.

On May 1, 1865, Charleston's freedpeople gathered at the old racetrack to decorate the graves of 257 Union prisoners of war whom the retreating Confederate army had hastily buried. The mostly African American crowd watched the 35th and 104th United States Colored Troops and the famed 54th Massachusetts Infantry drill, heard speeches on the meaning of the long, bloody war, and then scattered flowers on the graves of men who had died for the Union and for liberty.

The Union burial ground in Charleston where the 1865 observance took place. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-stereo-1s01306.

From Reconstruction to World War I

African Americans remained central to Memorial Day, especially in the South. Through Reconstruction they made up the great majority of the day's observers there, while federal occupying forces still policed the decoration of Confederate graves. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, Black speakers used the day to push back against efforts to rehabilitate the Confederate cause. Speaking to Union veterans in New York on Decoration Day 1878, Frederick Douglass said: "There was a right side and a wrong side in the late war which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget, and while today we should have malice toward none and charity toward all, it is no part of our duty to confound right with wrong, or loyalty with treason."

From the 1880s well into the 1910s, Black veterans held a prominent place in the day. Local Black posts of the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.) regularly led services at Columbian Harmony Cemetery in Washington, D.C. When a Black G.A.R. post was placed behind a white cadet brigade at the 1898 Memorial Day parade in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, its veterans walked out in protest — and the outcry was such that the next year the post marched at the head of the parade.

African American veterans in New York City's Memorial Day parade, May 30, 1912. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-132913.

Reconciliation, and resistance to it

In 1898, in a spirit of reconciliation, President McKinley opened the national cemeteries to Confederate dead, and after the Spanish-American War and World War I, Memorial Day came to honor all of America's war dead, not only the Union's. Many Union veterans, Black and white, objected. The year before the Logan statue's dedication, the Maryland Department of the G.A.R. refused an invitation from McKinley and Governor John W. Smith to the Memorial Day dedication of the Maryland State Monument at Antietam, which honored Marylanders of both sides. Department Commander John R. King called it a "perversion" of a day "set apart sacred to the memory of our own dead."

At a Memorial Day ceremony in Washington in 1911, M.C. Maxfield put the Black veterans' case plainly: "The Constitution that governs us was sustained by the sword and bayonet. The Black soldier played an important part, and as an evidence of their valor, look at yonder graves."

A last parade

Even as white Southerners embraced Memorial Day at the turn of the century, Black Civil War veterans kept their part in it until the last of them was gone. Joseph Clovese was born enslaved on a Louisiana plantation in January 1844, escaped in 1862, and served as an infantryman in the 63rd United States Colored Infantry. He was one of only six G.A.R. members well enough to attend the organization's final reunion, in 1949. In May 1951 he got himself released from a Michigan veterans' hospital to march in the local Memorial Day parade and join the Fourth of July celebrations. He fell into a coma on July 9 and died four days later, at 107 — the last surviving Black veteran of the Civil War — and was buried with full military honors and a 21-gun salute.

Sources

Rewritten from the National Park Service article "African American Contributions to Memorial Day" (National Mall and Memorial Parks; public domain), in hubnx's own words; its quotations from 1878–1911 are given as printed. A caption there calls the Charleston observance the first Memorial Day, while the article itself calls it one of the earliest; the page follows the article. A 1949 photograph of the G.A.R.'s final reunion is not reproduced.