Today, let's remember that the first Memorial Day celebration was held on May 1, 1865 by Black people in Charleston, SC. As historian David Blight puts it, "The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration."

"During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions...at least 257 died of disease & were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand."

"After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway...on which they inscribed the words, 'Martyrs of the Race Course.'"

"The freedpeople...in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

"The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses."

"Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible."

"After the dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and watched soldiers drill."

"Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite."

"The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots."

This is from David Blight's 2011 essay in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/opinion/30blight.html

If you’re looking for a more thorough outline of that day and the larger history that surrounds it, I highly recommend Blight’s RACE AND REUNION. An incredible and essential book.