UPDATED: 12:03 p.m. ET, May 21, 2020 —
Memorial Day has long been known as a holiday to celebrate and honor America’s soldiers.
According to BlackAmericaWeb, David Blight, a history professor at Yale University, said that “Decoration Day” was held in Charleston to honor fallen soldiers from the Union Army in the North, though other cities have refuted his findings.
The myth-busting research website Snopes, which also acknowledges that Blacks founded the Memorial Day, says the commemoration was formalized by an order issued in 1868 by Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, who called for the annual decoration of war graves.
According to Snopes:
Three years after the Civil War ended, on May 5, 1868, the head of an organization of Union veterans — the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) — established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers.
In May 1966 the city of Waterloo, New York, was designated as the “Birthplace of Memorial Day” via a Congressional resolution and presidential proclamation commemorating a patriotic observance held in that town one hundred years earlier[.]
