Notices by Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco (deglassco@mastodon.social), page 2

On May 1, 1865, in the first spring of freedom, Black Charlestonians held a procession to honor Union soldiers buried in a mass grave.
They came with roses. With hymns. With children.
It was the first Memorial Day.
But America gave the credit to others—and buried the memory.

#MemorialDay #History #Histodons #Politics
1/21

Image: Black American Civil War Memorial, Spirit of Freedom statue by Ed Hamilton 1997, NPS Photo Washington DC

A wooden arch was built above the burial ground, and across it, in bold lettering, someone had painted: Martyrs of the Race Course. And then, after hours of solemn ritual and music and testimony, the graves were decorated. They were not left bare again.
5/21

Image: Memorial Market in Hampton Park, Charleston, South Carolina

They came with roses. With sermons. With songs. With schoolchildren—three thousand of them, marching in lines, each bearing a flower, each humming or singing the old abolitionist hymn, “John Brown’s Body.” Black pastors led prayers. Black troops stood in salute.
4/21

Image: The plaque in Hampton Park commemorating the first Memorial Day was dedicated in 2010.

They gathered not to celebrate a battle or to protest an injustice, but to bury the dead. In the waning weeks of the war, 257 Union prisoners had died there—of disease, of neglect, of despair—and been cast into a mass grave behind the grandstand. Now, the people who had once been enslaved came to raise them up.
3/21

Image: Frances Benjamin Johnston, Students Saluting the Flag at the Whittier Primary School, circa 1899-1900.

It happened in Charleston, South Carolina, in the first spring of emancipation. On May 1, 1865, ten thousand Black men, women, and children gathered at the old Washington Race Course, a once-opulent symbol of antebellum wealth that the Confederacy had turned into a prison camp for Union soldiers.
2/21

Image: April 1865 photo of the graves of Union soldiers buried at the race course-turned-Confederate-prison where historians believe the first Memorial Day took place. Library of Congress.

It would be white women in Columbus, Georgia, or Richmond, Virginia, who would be credited in the national record. It would be the Confederacy’s widows who were remembered for decorating graves.

9/21

Image: Daughters of the Confederacy unveiling the "Southern Cross" monument at Arlington, VA, 1914.

And yet, as so often happens when the contributions of Black Americans intersect with the making of national memory, the record was altered. The act of founding—the first Memorial Day—was obscured, reattributed, covered over by another version.

8/21

Image: General John A. Logan, Commander and Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic. Given official credit for establishing the first Memorial Day, May 30, 1868.

For the Black citizens of Charleston—newly freed, barely weeks into their emancipation—had laid claim not just to the bodies in those graves, but to the memory of the war itself. They had buried the Union dead with honor. And in so doing, they had given birth to what would one day be called Memorial Day.
7/21

Image: Black American laborer between 1861-1865, known as contraband. These men worked as teamsters for the Union army.

It was, as one newspaper would later write, “a procession of friends and mourners such as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.” But it was more than a procession. It was a declaration. A statement of historical authorship.
6/21

Image: A sketch of Union Cemetery–today Hampton Park –appeared in Harper’s Weekly magazine on May 18, 1867.

As textbooks and civic rituals adopted their version, the memory of Charleston’s Black commemorators faded. What remained was the myth.

12/21

Image: The carving on Stone Mountain depicts the Confederate icons Robert E. Lee, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, and Jefferson Davis. Commissioned by the president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

And just as they built monuments to generals and named schools after secessionists, they also built a history—one where Black agency was minimized, and where white loss was sacralized. Decoration Day was theirs, they insisted—not born of Black mourning, but of white grief.

11/21

Image: The Lanier of Glynn Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, pictured in 1979, decorate a monument in Brantley County dedicated to Confederate soldiers who died of yellow fever during the Civil War.

The obscuring of the May 1 procession was not accidental. It was the result of a campaign—deliberate, organized, successful. That campaign had a name: the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

10//21

Image: Members of the Margaret Jones Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy are pictured in Waynesboro, GA circa 1900.

58 years ago:

“Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger."

For this refusal—for standing on faith in a country that demanded obedience—he was made an example. The response came swift: they stripped him of his title, suspended him from boxing, fined him $10,000, and, on June 20, 1967, sentenced him to five years in federal prison.
#History #Histodons #Politics
1/5
Video: Muhammad Ali Refuses Army Induction, April 28, 1967.
https://youtube.com/shorts/Z2xrr2OuoYg?si=sgOcYyfS8d5ZJq1Q

The Book of Negroes is more than names—it is a silent archive of human dignity. A ledger that refused to let the lives it recorded disappear. A testament to courage, to desperation, and to the unceasing demand to be remembered.
12/17

Image: William Homes in the "Book of Negroes" - July 31, 1783, Independence National Historical Park

“Deborah, 20, pock-marked, formerly the property of George Washington; left him 4 years ago.” Deborah Squash—reduced in the ledger to a blemish, but her name tells another story. She fled Mount Vernon, seized the chaos of revolution, and gambled everything for a chance at freedom.
11/17

Image: Entry of Deborah Squash in the Book of Negroes. Credit: Library and Archives Canada. Original Author: Guy Carleton.

Into this world stepped Lord Dunmore—driven from Williamsburg, his power shrinking by the day. Desperate, he made his gamble: a promise of freedom to any enslaved person who would fight for the Crown.
3/17

Image: John Murray, the 4th Earl of Dunmore, image from a portrait painting by Joshua Reynolds, circa 1765.

To understand the ledger, you must understand the world in which it was written—a world where liberty was a word spoken loudly by men who owned slaves. The American Revolution was a rebellion wrapped in rhetoric, a fight for freedom built on the backs of the unfree.
2/17

Image: Dunmore's Proclamation signed November 7, 1775.

The Book of Negroes is more than a ledger—it is a story pressed into parchment, a testament to the brutal arithmetic of freedom. It begins in the final days of the American Revolution, a conflict that promised liberty but delivered it unevenly.
1/17
#History #BlackMastodon #Education #Histodons #Politics

Image: Rose Fortune came to Nova Scotia after the Revolutionary War, about June 1784. She earned a living as a "trucker," carrying baggage with a wheelbarrow.

NOVA SCOTIA ARCHIVES

And so came the Book of Negroes—not a casual record, but a ledger. A collection of names, dates, and descriptions. Beneath the ink-stained parchment is a record of lives caught in the violent churn of a revolution that promised liberty but denied it to many.
6/17

Image: The Inspection Roll of Negroes, the National Archives, Washington DC.

When the war ended, their promise of freedom did not dissolve—it hardened into a question. How to be free? In the docks of New York, thousands of Black Loyalists gathered, men, women, and children who had wagered everything on the British.

5/17

Image: A record of some of the orders issued by Sir Guy Carleton during the American War of Independence.