Even though roughly 180,000 Black men served in the Union Army, the holiday in many communities would essentially become “white Memorial Day,” especially after the rise of the Jim Crow South, Railton said. His concerns were well-founded, said Ben Railton, a professor of English and American studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. “We must never forget that the loyal soldiers who rest beneath this sod flung themselves between the nation and the nation’s destroyers,” Douglass said. In 1871, abolitionist Frederick Douglass feared Americans were forgetting the Civil War’s impetus - slavery - when he gave a Decoration Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery. (AP Photo/Erik Verduzco)Īs early as 1869, The New York Times wrote that the holiday could become “sacrilegious” and no longer “sacred” if it focuses more on pomp, dinners and oratory. Auto club AAA said this summer could be “one for the record books, especially at airports,” with more than 43 million Americans projected to travel 50 miles or more. People check in at the American Airlines ticket counter at Charlotte Douglas International Airport on Thursday, May 25, 2023, in Charlotte, N.C. Someone has always lamented the holiday’s drift from its original meaning. HAS MEMORIAL DAY ALWAYS BEEN A SOURCE OF CONTENTION? The ceremony’s organizers turned off his microphone because they said it wasn’t relevant to honoring the city’s veterans. Army lieutenant colonel cited the story in a Memorial Day speech in Hudson, Ohio. “What happened in Charleston does have the right to claim to be first, if that matters,” Blight told The Associated Press in 2011. After the war, members of Black churches buried them in individual graves. And women in some Confederate states were decorating graves before the war’s end.īut David Blight, a Yale history professor, points to May 1, 1865, when as many as 10,000 people, many of them Black, held a parade, heard speeches and dedicated the graves of Union dead in Charleston, South Carolina.Ī total of 267 Union troops had died at a Confederate prison and were buried in a mass grave. Yet Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, traced its first observance to October 1864, according to the Library of Congress. Waterloo, New York, began a formal observance on May 5, 1866, and was later proclaimed to be the holiday’s birthplace. The practice was already widespread on a local level. It occurred May 30, 1868, after an organization of Union veterans called for decorating war graves with flowers, which were in bloom. There’s little controversy over the first national observance of what was then called Decoration Day. The holiday stems from the American Civil War, which killed more than 600,000 service members - both Union and Confederate - between 18. Infantry Regiment also known as The Old Guard place flags in front of each headstone for “Flags-In” at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Thursday, May 25, 2023, to honor the Nation’s fallen military heroes ahead of Memorial Day. WHAT ARE THE HOLIDAY’S ORIGINS? Members of the 3rd U.S. The holiday is observed in part by the National Moment of Remembrance, which encourages all Americans to pause at 3 p.m. military, according to the Congressional Research Service. It’s a day of reflection and remembrance of those who died while serving in the U.S. WHAT IS THE OFFICIAL PURPOSE OF MEMORIAL DAY? It isn’t just the barbecue.”īut he tries not to judge others who spend the holiday differently: “How can I expect them to understand the depth of what I feel when they haven’t experienced anything like that?” “Memorial Day is very personal,” said Castañeda, who also served in the Marines and Army National Guard, from which he knew men who died in combat. Marine who served in Vietnam, in an accident in California while training other Marines in 1966. Federal officials said Friday that the number of air travelers had already hit a pandemic-era high.īut for Manuel Castañeda Jr., 58, the day will be a quiet one in Durand, Illinois, outside Rockford. (AP) - Memorial Day is supposed to be about mourning the nation’s fallen service members, but it’s come to anchor the unofficial start of summer and a long weekend of discounts on anything from mattresses to lawn mowers.Īuto club AAA said in a travel forecast that this holiday weekend could be “one for the record books, especially at airports,” with more than 42 million Americans projected to travel 50 miles (80 kilometers) or more.

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