05/25/2026
"It Is For You That I Work To End All War"
BISHOP BARBER & JONATHAN WILSON-HARTGROVE's Substack reflections on the suppressed origins of Memorial Day:
"The U.S. Civil War began in April of 1861 when Confederate rebels in Charleston, South Carolina, attacked federal troops at Fort Sumter. Four years later, in the spring of 1865, Charleston lay in ruin, largely abandoned by white residents whose Confederacy had dissolved in surrender.
Formerly enslaved Black people met the troops of the Twenty First U.S. Colored Infantry who marched up Meeting Street singing songs of freedom. A war waged to defend what John C. Calhoun had called the “liberty” to hold other people as property was lost. The victors were those who had risked life and liberty to preserve a union dedicated to the proposition, as Lincoln famously said, that all people are created equal.
By April of 1865, Lincoln joined the nearly three quarter million Americans who had died in the Civil War. Black people who understood the cost of the war knew that Union soldiers who’d died as prisoners of war in Charleston were buried in a mass grave at the Washington Race Course. (This history was largely forgotten by most Americans until our Yale colleague, David Blight, wrote about it in his Race and Reunion.)
In the spring of 1865, as Black people and Union soldiers had begun to rebuild Charleston, Black workmen had taken it upon themselves to honor the Union dead by exhuming some 260 bodies from a hole behind the grandstand of the race track and re-interning them in marked graves. They put a fence around the grave site, whitewashed it, and erected an entryway inscribed “Martyrs of the Race Course.” On May 1, 1865, a parade of 10,000 people marched around this new memorial to honor the Union dead.
Though it was first called “Decoration Day,” this tradition of honoring those who’ve died in battle became the Memorial Day that Americans mark today. Often co-opted by the heirs of Charleston’s planter class who sent poor men to war to defend their property rights, Memorial Day truly belongs to those who understand the true cost of freedom - not to the greedy who are willing to sacrifice other people’s children so they can protect their money and power."
Go to the link below for their whole post, and a video of a testimony from a veteran who shared at a Moral Monday outside Sen. Thom Tillis’ office this spring. Recalling the death of a fellow solider in Vietnam, he said, “It is for you that I work to end all war.” https://ourmoralmoment.substack.com/p/it-is-for-you-that-i-work-to-end?utm_source=substack&publication_id=4608222&post_id=199174334&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=3alo4m&triedRedirect=true
-- CM
