Memorial Day, 2025: For the Sake of Memory
Remembrance is never neutral. It can either uphold erasure or carry forward the stories power tried to silence.
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In the spring of 1865, just weeks after the Civil War had ended, Charleston, South Carolina remained a city scarred by siege and loss. At the Washington Race Course—a site once reserved for wealth and sport but later converted into a Confederate prison camp—hundreds of Union soldiers had died in captivity and were hastily buried behind the grandstand.
On May 1 of that year, something extraordinary happened. Thousands of newly emancipated Black residents, along with Union soldiers, teachers, and religious leaders, organized a ceremony to honor the dead. They cleaned the gravesites, built a new fence around them, and erected an archway inscribed with the words “Martyrs of the Race Course.” In a procession led by Black children carrying flowers and singing spirituals, they reclaimed the memory of those who had fallen—doing so as newly free people, determined to speak the names that war and slavery had tried to silence.
Though the event was not repeated annually and soon faded from the official record, historians now regard it as the earliest known public memorial resembling what we now call Memorial Day. The intention was clear: to mourn, to honor, and to claim space in the national story—not just as survivors, but as stewards of remembrance.
Remembrance as Responsibility
We often frame Memorial Day as a tribute to sacrifice. But it is also, fundamentally, a test of memory. Who gets remembered? Who is forgotten? And what does it mean to recall the dead when the systems they fought against have not entirely disappeared?
The 1865 ceremony in Charleston was more than a gesture of mourning. It was an act of public clarity by people who knew they had been denied dignity in life—and might also be denied it in death unless they told their own stories. To remember the Union dead was also to remember what the war had cost, and what emancipation had made possible. It was a declaration: freedom had been fought for, and someone would carry that memory forward.
From Charleston to Arlington
The Charleston gathering may not have entered the national calendar, but three years later, a new tradition began to take hold. On May 5, 1868, General John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic issued General Order No. 11, calling for a nationwide observance to decorate the graves of Union soldiers. The first official Decoration Day was held that same month, with more than 20,000 graves adorned at Arlington National Cemetery.
That moment formalized a practice already present in many communities—particularly in the South—where women’s groups had long gathered to tend the graves of fallen soldiers. But by making it national, the Grand Army of the Republic centered the day on Union sacrifice, initially excluding Confederate graves and many Black participants and their stories.
It would take decades for the scope of remembrance to expand. In 1967, the name “Memorial Day” was formally recognized by federal law. In 1971, Congress established it as a national holiday, fixed to the last Monday in May. But by then, much of the original complexity—and the stories of the people who remembered first—had been stripped away.
Still, Charleston came first.
It wasn’t declared by generals or presidents. It wasn’t streamlined for national unity or divorced from the politics of race and power. It was community-led. Spirit-led. A sacred act of memory by people who had every reason to move on—but refused to forget.
This Day, This Year
Memorial Day 2025 arrives at a time of deep uncertainty. The fabric of public life feels frayed. Voting access has been restricted in many states under the guise of “election security.” School boards and legislatures are deciding which histories are permitted—and which are too uncomfortable to be named. In some parts of the country, libraries face pressure to remove not just books, but memory itself.
None of this feels dramatic in the moment. That’s how erosion works: quietly. Through fatigue, not force. Through forgetting.
That’s why days like this matter—not because they are solemn, but because they are reminders. We cannot honor the dead while abandoning the truth they died for. Memory is not a luxury. It is a responsibility.
What We Do With This Day
Maybe we lay flowers. Maybe we make art. Maybe we speak the names history tried to bury. Maybe we revisit what we were taught as children and begin to ask what was left out—and why.
Or maybe we sit with the tension between what this country promises and what it delivers—and choose to remember anyway.
Because this day was never meant to be ornamental. It was meant to instruct us.
The people who gathered in Charleston in 1865 didn’t know whether their commemoration would be remembered. But they still held the ceremony. They still sang. They still told the truth. They didn’t need national approval to make memory sacred.
That is the tradition we inherit.
We Remember Because They Did
When the freedpeople of Charleston gathered, they weren’t seeking credit. They weren’t writing history—they were correcting it. They understood that remembrance wasn’t only about honoring the dead. It was about shaping the world the living might still create.
When Union veterans established Decoration Day three years later, they may not have known how far the tradition would reach—or how many layers would be added or stripped away.
But still, they remembered.
Now it’s our turn.
Not to restore a perfect past. But to carry forward the unfinished work of memory. To insist that remembrance includes the whole story—even when it’s painful. Even when it’s inconvenient.
This land isn’t just history.
It’s a story still being written.
Let’s remember who started it—and why.
Editor’s Note
This essay draws on well-established historical accounts, including the work of David W. Blight, archives from the Library of Congress, and reporting by NPR and the Smithsonian Institution. All facts have been carefully paraphrased, with citations provided to ensure transparency and respect for original scholarship.
While the facts are rooted in research, the reflection and framing are original to Torch & Tinder Press. Our intent is not to restate others’ work but to build upon it—to connect the past to the present in a way that helps us remember, together, what’s still at stake.
Learn More
David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 65–70.
NPR, “Historian Uncovers Memorial Day’s Freed Black Origins,” May 24, 2011. https://www.npr.org/2011/05/30/136723038/historian-uncovers-memorial-days-freed-black-origins
Library of Congress, “General Order No. 11,” May 5, 1868. https://www.loc.gov/item/pin2205
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