Martyrs of Memory – by William C. Green

At 3pm local time today, Americans are asked to pause for a moment of remembrance.

Memorial Day stirs up mixed feelings about patriotism and America. Love for our country and gratitude for those who died for it can get lost in our anger at what our country has become and our fatigue at what we still refuse to face. What were those sacrifices made for? This day, I asked myself such a question. Ask yourself what kind of memories of the country you want to create.

The origins of Memorial Day date back to the Civil War. The Civil War claimed approximately 620,000 American lives, more than any other war in American history. If the same percentage of Americans died in Vietnam, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial would have about 4 million names instead of 58,000.

How should Americans remember the dead of the wars they fought against each other?Walt Whitman summed up the burden in one word: “The dead, the dead, the dead, our dead, or all of us, south or north.”

However, this part of history has long been pushed to the side. More than 180,000 African American men served in the United States Colored Military Forces. Early in the war, neither the United States nor the Confederacy accepted black men as soldiers. In the South, enslaved people were forced to dig trenches, build forts, work in hospitals and factories, and drive wagons. When Union forces occupied southern territories, formerly enslaved people were often forced to do the same labor.

Things changed in 1862 when Congress authorized the enlistment of black soldiers. Even then, they served under white officers, faced contempt from many white Union soldiers, and were often treated more like workers than soldiers. Some blamed them for the war itself. They endured danger from both Confederate rage and Northern prejudice. But as they fought and their courage became undeniable, they convinced those who doubted them.

The earliest and most notable Memorial Day observances took place where the war began.

In the spring of 1865, Charleston, South Carolina, was in ruins after being surrounded and bombarded. The city where secession began was now occupied by Union forces. Among the first soldiers to enter Charleston and march down Meeting Street and sing songs of liberation were soldiers from the 21st United States Colored Infantry Regiment. Their commander accepted the surrender of the city.

Most of the white residents fled. Thousands of black residents, many of them former slaves, remained. They understood war with a clarity that others later obscured. They held commemorations of victories and sacrifices.

In the final year of the war, Confederate forces converted Charleston’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an open-air prison for Union prisoners of war. The prisoners were kept on the tracks. At least 257 people died from disease and exposure and were buried behind the bleachers.

After the Confederate retreat, black laborers went to the site, reburied the Union dead, and surrounded the cemetery with a whitewashed fence. They erected an arch over the entrance and inscribed three words: “Martyr of the Racecourse.”

On May 1, 1865, thousands of people gathered there. The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren, who held roses and sang “The Body of John Brown.” Hundreds of black women followed, carrying baskets of flowers, wreaths, and crosses. Blacks marched behind them, followed by Union infantry. Inside the cemetery, a black children’s choir sang “Rally Around the Flag,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and spirituals. A black pastor reads the Bible.

It was a memorial, but also a declaration. The ignored will be respected. Those in hiding will be named martyrs. Wars were fought over slavery, and the first great ceremonies of national mourning were shaped by those who knew the cost of emancipation.

Memorial Day didn’t just begin as a custom of flags, flowers, and graves. It began as an act of moral clarity. Former slaves honored the Union dead because memory is never neutral. It tells the country what it has experienced, what it has done, and what it must not forget.

After the dedication ceremony, the crowd entered the infield for picnics, speeches, and training. Union infantry, including the 54th Massachusetts, 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, participated and marched around the grave.

The war ended, and Memorial Day began as an African American-led act of remembrance and consecration. The meaning was clear. Emancipation, not a republic of slaveholders, stole the country’s future. they were patriots.

Frederick Douglass addressed that claim in his 1878 Memorial Day speech in New York City. According to him, this war was not just a “partial” war, but a “battle of ideas, a battle of principles,” in which “slavery and freedom” opposed each other, and it was fought for “something beyond the battlefield.”

That “something” remains the question on Memorial Day.

Our God, let us not stray from the place where we met you.
May our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, forget you.
A shadow hides under your hand,
may we stand forever,
be faithful to our God,
True to our homeland.

―James Weldon Johnson, “Let’s raise every voice and sing”

notes and reading

• james mcpherson The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988) and The War That Built the Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters (2015)—the first book remains a classic one-volume account of the causes, course, and consequences of war. The second provides a shorter, later discussion of why the Civil War still shapes American conflicts over unions, liberty, race, civil rights, and national purpose.

• heather cox richardson How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Battle for the Soul of America (2020)—Richardson, Boston University historian and “ letter from americanargues that the Confederacy’s anti-democratic habits migrated west and reemerged in subsequent battles over race, labor, democracy, and power.

• David Bright America’s Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era— Focusing on four writers: Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin, this book researched the memory of the Civil War during the civil rights movement and asked what Americans remember about the Civil War and what they would like to forget.

• “United States Colored Troops”—American Civil War Museum. Formation and experience of USCT. The journey of black soldiers from exclusion and forced labor to enlistment, discrimination, combat, and recognition.

• “Service, Sacrifice, and Citizenship: Vote Blocked Episode 1” —national park service (June 11, 2021). About black military service, family sacrifice, and citizenship before voting, including how African American women supported USCT soldiers and claimed official belonging in a country where they were denied full citizenship. Enslaved people and freedmen also aided the Union army with their knowledge of the terrain of the South and Confederate movements. Harriet Tubman served as a nurse, scout, and spy for the Union Army in South Carolina, where she helped lead the Combahee River Raid, which liberated more than 700 slaves.

• Another overlooked fact. Approximately 25 percent of those who served in the Union Army and Navy during the Civil War were foreign-born immigrants. — “Who fought?” American Battlefield Trust (November 15, 2024).

• The Habit of Forgetting—Johnny Thomson think bigMay 19, 2026. “Dead Closure”: Inherited views become rigid, leading to unconsidered decisions. Nations inherit not only memory but also the habit of forgetting. The moral challenge is to realize which past has threatened our vision before deciding what is worthy of honor.

James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (1900), set to music by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson, became known as the Negro national anthem and was adopted as the official song by the NAACP in 1919.

what is not

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