Memorial Day has been set aside to honor all U.S. military members that have died in military service. This is different from Veterans Day and Armed Forces Day.
Decoration Day
Originally it was called Decoration Day. General John A. Logan called for a nationwide day of remembrance. He stated,
“The 30th of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land”.
This day was chosen because it wasn’t the anniversary of any particular battle of the Civil War. The name of this holiday was changed from “Decoration Day” to “Memorial Day” in 1882.
May 30th, 1868 was the first nationally commemorated Memorial Day. Before this, many Northern states held similar commemorative events. By 1890 each one had made Decoration Day an official state holiday. Southern states honored their dead on separate days until after WWI.
The Real first Memorial Day
In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson and the Congress declared Waterloo, New York as the official “birthplace of Memorial Day”. Waterloo was chosen because it hosted an annual, event where residents decorated the graves of soldiers.
Fast forward to 1996 when David Blight, a professor of American History at Yale University, discovered a hand written narrative. This was by an old veteran and told the story of the first “Decoration Day”. There was even a reference to an article in the The New York Tribune. This narrative went on to tell the story of emancipated people of Charleston, South Carolina. That they exhumed the bodies of Union Prisoners of war (POWs) that had been buried in a mass grave. They then gave the fallen Union soldiers a proper burial in a new cemetery surrounded by a tall whitewashed fence
Mr. Blight found two reports of an event that occurred on May 1st, 1865. One report was in The New York Tribune. The other was in The Charleston Courier. On that day 10,000 people of freed slaves and some white missionaries staged a parade around the race track . Three thousand Black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and sang “John Brown’s Body.” Members of the famed 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments were in attendance and performed double-time marches. Black ministers recited verses from the Bible.
This written and published account of the actual first Memorial Day states it occurred in Charleston, South Carolina. The date was May 1st, 1865.
Modern Memorial Day
Memorial Day was expanded to remember soldiers from all American wars, after WWI. In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared that Memorial Day was to be celebrated on the last Monday of May.
In 2000, Congress passed the National Moment of Remembrance Act. This act encourages Americans to observe a moment of silence at 3 p.m. local time to remember those who have died in service.
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