Currently on the National Parks Service website is the following description of what is believed to be the first commemoration of Decoration Day, now known as Memorial Day. It reads as follows: 

“On May 1, 1865, the freed people of Charleston gathered at the old racetrack to decorate the graves of 257 Union prisoners of war who had been hastily buried by the retreating Confederate army. The largely African American crowd watched the men of the 35^th and 104^th United States Colored Troops (USCT), along with the men of the famed 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, perform drills before listening to speeches addressing the meaning of the long and bloody war. When the ceremonies were finished, the crowd dispersed to lay flowers on the graves of the men who had died fighting for Union and for liberty.[4]”

From the end of the Civil War, through Reconstruction and the betrayal and subsequent terror that followed its ending, African American families have paused every May to recognize and honor the sacrifice not only of their sons and husbands but of all those who fought and “died to make men free”.   

In 1878, a year after Reconstruction ended, Frederick Douglass  warned that, “There was a right side and a wrong side in the late war which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget, and while today we should have malice toward none and charity toward all, it is no part of our duty to confound right with wrong, or loyalty with treason.”

In 1898, President William McKinley opened the National Cemeteries to the Confederate war dead, helping to further usher in the collective softening of the moral outrage over enslavement and treason.  At the time, many Union veterans, both Black and white, believed that the various dedications to war dead that included Confederate soldiers was a  “perversion” of a holiday that “was a day set apart sacred to the memory of our own dead.”  

By the time the last African American Civil War veteran died in 1951 at the age of 107, the myth of the South fighting for “state rights” and the “Lost Cause” was once again colliding with the ugly, violent truth of White Supremacy and Domestic Terrorism.  Under the guise of reconciliation, the nation had whitewashed its history and was undergoing yet another reckoning.

On Memorial Day 2026 the nation is again attempting to whitewash treason regarding the January 6th insurrection and elevate white supremacy in the President’s call to redistricting in advance of the midterm elections and the Supreme Court’s ruling dismantling the Voting Rights Act.

Perhaps on this Memorial Day people will recognize that the War to Save the Union and the War to Set Men Free has not yet ended, and let this truth keep marching on! 

Battle Hymn of the Republic
by Julia Ward Howe

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

Chorus:
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.

Chorus

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”

Chorus

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

Chorus

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

Chorus

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,
Our God is marching on.

Chorus