The Origin of Memorial Day

This Memorial Day, I again saw how the liberal media lies by omitting the most important details. In this case, the important detail was the true origin and meaning of Memorial Day. Predictably, they did talk about the many people who lost their lives in more recent conflicts, and I certainly appreciate that they should be remembered on Memorial Day, too — but their sacrifice is not the reason we began the Memorial Day tradition.

Memorial Day began as Decoration Day, and it began because the fascist trash of the confederacy chose to bury Union soldiers in a mass grave behind a horse track in Charleston, South Carolina.

Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

Dr. David W. Blight, The First Decoration Day

The Charleston race track prison camp was the sequel to the horrific Andersonville prison camp.

You may have heard that Republicans are trying to ban the teaching of real history by calling uncomfortable truths “critical race theory” and then banning the teaching of “critical race theory”. Critical race theory (CRT) is a real thing, but conservatives are using the term to mean a conspiracy among liberal elites to make them face the consequences of America’s racist past — which means they are putting the CRT label on any teaching of true, complete US history. For conservatives, anything that points out the truth of racism is “divisive” but the racism itself is somehow not divisive. It’s almost like they are racists trying to deny that racism exists.

It would be nice if the liberal media would not help them by omitting important details that point to the truth of the matter — a truth that consistently supports the positions of the left.