Despite the “sales events” and “blow outs”, Memorial Day still holds a special place as an American holiday. My sense is that it remains a day when many people take time to remember and reflect on the sacrifices of the more than one million soldiers who have died in wars for the United States. For those who have lost loved ones recently, it is especially strong and emotional. But for everyone it is a day of collective memory, and its solemn nature facilitates reflection in a way that is harder on other holidays like the Fourth of July.
The juxtaposition of grief and celebration, of graves and picnics, may seem hard to comprehend. I find it helps balance these to think about what the historian David Blight has identified as the first Memorial Day. On May 1, 1865, amid the ruins of Charleston, South Carolina, several thousand blacks–most formerly enslaved—held a memorial for the Union dead. Here is Blight’s description from his New York Times op-ed published a few years ago:
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 in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and 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 over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
Blight goes on to describe how 10,000 freedpeople, missionaries, teachers, and Union soldiers held a parade, led by 3,000 children carrying roses and singing John Brown’s Body. After singing patriotic songs, spirituals, and listening to sermons, the group held picnics and watched soldiers drill (including the 54th Massachusetts).
Since Blight wrote about this event (in his book Race and Reunion and in forums like the Times), it has been frequently noted. Nice pieces on it can be found here and here, and a segment of the PBS documentary Death and the Civil War here.
In addition to bringing together the feelings of grief and honor with those of celebration and freedom, this event also shows the importance of public activities as foundational moments. From a founding day of memorial to a wide range of activities such as public protests, religious meetings, schools, political gatherings, and voting, actions taken in public and often in groups (and the violent battles over such events) defined the post-war era at least as much as did writings and speeches.
As I think about the possible meanings for constitutional concepts such as equal citizenship, I am often struck by the ways in which such public events and public actions carry meanings that we often overlook in favor of written texts. Taking these events seriously as sources of meaning, however, raises complicated issues of interpretation that constitutional and legal study, at least, may not yet have the tools to do very well. But I am becoming more convinced that doing so will be an important part of any effort to recover meaning from traditionally excluded groups.
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