Honoring Sacrifice, Uplifting Truth: A Memorial Day Reflection

By Councilman Carlos Clanton

Today, we pause as a nation to honor the brave men and women who gave their lives in service to our country. Their sacrifice is the foundation of the freedoms we cherish. But as we remember those who served, we must reflect on how this sacred day of remembrance began and the remarkable legacy that helped shape it.

One of the earliest Memorial Day observances occurred on May 1, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, just after the end of the Civil War. It wasn’t a government mandate or national decree that called the people to remembrance; it was the courage, reverence, and resilience of newly freed African Americans.

Alongside white missionaries, these freed men and women reclaimed the grounds of a former Confederate prison camp where over 250 Union soldiers had died in deplorable conditions. They exhumed the bodies from a mass grave, gave them proper burials, and built a fenced cemetery with an archway inscribed “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

On that day, more than 10,000 people gathered to honor the fallen. Led by 3,000 Black schoolchildren carrying roses and singing “John Brown’s Body,” the procession included Black women with baskets of flowers, Union infantrymen, including the 54th Massachusetts, and a children’s choir that sang as ministers prayed over the site.

This was not only a memorial; it was a declaration of dignity. It was a public ceremony of healing, history, and hope. It was a message to the world: freedom must be remembered, and those who fought for it must never be forgotten.

As we commemorate Memorial Day in Norfolk and nationwide, let us carry this legacy.

Let us honor all who have served, past and present, with the same reverence shown by those freed citizens in Charleston. Let us uplift the whole truth of our shared American story. And let us commit ourselves to building a future worthy of their sacrifice.

We remember with gratitude. We act with purpose.

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