The history of Memorial Day, born out of the carnage of the Civil War, tells us a lot about our country today.

Before the first official commemoration, on May 30, 1868, when flowers and flags were placed on the graves of Union soldiers in Arlington National Cemetery, others had sprung up, organically and independently, in the North and South, so widespread was the devastation and loss.

Some of those solemn events were rooted in a desire to put the war in the past, and to recast it as a war between brothers who have now reconciled.

That point of view led to the failure of Reconstruction and the continuation of white supremacy in public institutions throughout the South — and it lives on today in everyone who fails to acknowledge the destructive, often insidious racism that infuses our society.

It starts with the fiction that the South was only fighting for their rights in the face of tyrannical federal government.

But while people today try to remake the Southern cause into something noble, and the Civil War into a temporary disagreement, the Americans at what is perhaps the first Memorial Day had no such illusions.

On May 1, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, where the war had begun four years earlier, a group of formerly enslaved Black men dug up the bodies of at least 257 Union soldiers who had died of exposure and disease at a Confederate prison, writes historian David Blight.

The men reburied the dead and built a fence around the property. Later, there were ceremonies, including a drill by the 54th Massachusetts, a famous Black regiment.

The honor left no doubt about the purpose of shedding all that blood — to free human beings held in dehumanizing bondage.

“The war, they had boldly announced, had been all about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic,” Blight writes, “and not about state rights, defense of home, nor merely soldiers’ valor and sacrifice.”

When we forget that, as so many do today, we cannot as a country reckon with the bloodiest time in its history, nor can we properly face the divides in this country that can be traced back to the institution of chattel slavery and the war that ended it.

No less an authority than Frederick Douglass saw this coming. The following statement comes from a speech on Memorial Day 1871 but is no less relevant today.

“We are sometimes asked, in the name of patriotism, to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life and those who struck to save it, those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice,” Douglass said to a crowd at Arlington Cemetery.

“I am no minister of malice. I would not strike the fallen. I would not repel the repentant; but may my ‘right hand forget her cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,’ if I forget the difference between the parties to that terrible, protracted, and bloody conflict.”

Confederate soldiers fought to hold Americans in enslavement.

Union soldiers fought for their freedom — the same freedom, we should remember this Memorial Day, that for generations Americans have fought and died for.

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