Memorial Day: Honoring Sacrifice and Uniting Communities
Quick answer: Where did Memorial Day begin?
Several communities claim it. In Charleston, South Carolina, freedpeople honored Union dead on May 1, 1865. In 1866 women in Columbus, Mississippi, decorated both Union and Confederate graves, and Waterloo, New York, held a community-wide Decoration Day on May 5 that Congress later recognized as Memorial Day's birthplace.
Memorial Day, John writes, is a mosaic of stories from many places. In Charleston, South Carolina, less than a month after Robert E. Lee's surrender in 1865, Black men and women recently freed from slavery reburied Union prisoners who had died at the city's racecourse and held a ceremony on May 1 with flowers, songs, and a parade, which historian David Blight has called the first Decoration Day. In Columbus, Mississippi, in April 1866, a group of women decorated the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers. That same spring, a pharmacist named Henry C. Welles in Waterloo, New York, proposed closing businesses for a day to decorate soldiers' graves. On May 5, 1866, the whole town turned out with flowers and flags, and a century later Congress and President Lyndon Johnson recognized Waterloo as the holiday's birthplace. John's point is that these separate acts of remembrance, by very different people, all fed into the national day we keep now.
Why it matters for leaders: Memorial Day belongs to all of us, and its many origins show that remembrance can bring people together across old divides.
Q: Who held the 1865 Charleston commemoration?
A: Freedpeople in Charleston, honoring Union soldiers who died as prisoners at the Washington Race Course, on May 1, 1865.
Q: Why is Waterloo, New York, called the birthplace of Memorial Day?
A: Its May 5, 1866 Decoration Day was a community-wide observance, and Congress and President Johnson formally recognized it in 1966.
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By John Fenzel, founder and CEO of Heroes' Path Foundation