Formerly Enslaved Americans Defined Memorial Day. Then the Lost Cause Rewrote It.

Before Project 2025, before I even finished graduate school, I had a tenderhearted, admittedly Pollyannish vision for America’s 250th anniversary: that we might finally start understanding holidays like Memorial Day as more than flag-laden abstractions.

On May 1, 1865, just weeks after the war ended, formerly enslaved Black Charlestonians returned to a mass grave behind the old Charleston Race Course in Charleston, South Carolina. During the war, the racetrack had been converted into a Confederate prison camp. Union soldiers who died there had been buried behind the grandstand.

Four years after secession began in pomp and certainty, the Confederacy ended in ash, surrender papers, and the collapse of a government built to perpetuate human bondage.

So the formerly enslaved returned with shovels, roses, and children carrying wreaths for the dead.

They exhumed the bodies, reburied them properly, and enclosed the cemetery they created. Above it they erected an arch reading: “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

Historian David W. Blight has called it the first Memorial Day. He argues that African Americans, standing amid the ruins of the Confederacy, publicly declared the meaning of the war before anyone else could soften it, sentimentalize it, or strip slavery from the center of the story.

The clarity of that act still lands with unusual force. Before the Lost Cause settled over textbooks, monuments, and civic memory, the people who had survived the Confederacy understood exactly what the war had been about. They buried the dead carefully. They marked the graves. They told the truth in public.

That, to me, was always the promise of the 250th: pride without amnesia, reckoning without self-loathing, and the stubborn belief that the country is always becoming.