This morning’s word is The First Memorial Day Was a Burial.
The anchor verse is Luke 4:18.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.”
Tomorrow is Memorial Day. Most people know it is the federal holiday observed on the last Monday of May. Fewer people know where it began.
It did not begin in Washington. It did not begin in Congress. It did not begin as a federal proclamation.
It began on May 1, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, with newly freed slaves burying Union soldiers.
Here is what happened.
During the last year of the Civil War, the Confederate army held captured Union soldiers at the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club in Charleston. The conditions were brutal. At least two hundred and fifty-seven of those Union prisoners died, most from disease, and were buried in a mass grave behind the racetrack grandstand. No names. No markers. No proper burial. They had given their lives for a war that was nearing its end and would never know that the side they fought for had won.
When Charleston fell in early 1865 and the Confederate forces evacuated, the Black community of Charleston did something extraordinary. For two weeks in April, formerly enslaved men and Black workmen exhumed the bodies from the mass grave behind the racetrack. They reinterred each one in a proper grave. They built a fence around the new cemetery. Over the entrance they inscribed the words Martyrs of the Racecourse.
And then on May 1, 1865, they held a parade.
Ten thousand people came. Three thousand Black schoolchildren marched first, carrying armfuls of flowers and singing John Brown’s Body. Behind them came the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments, performing double-time marches. Black ministers preached and read from the Bible. The day ended with prayer and picnics on the grass where the dead were now properly buried.
This was the first Memorial Day.
It was not organized by a government. It was not authorized by Congress. It happened three years before the first official national commemoration at Arlington in 1868. It happened a hundred and six years before Congress moved the holiday to the final Monday of May in 1971. It happened because the people the world had counted as nothing decided that someone had to bury the dead, and they were the ones close enough to do it.
Yale historian David Blight discovered the records of this ceremony in the uncataloged writings of a Union soldier at a Harvard library. The story had been mentioned briefly in a few books but largely forgotten. Blight made it visible. The original cemetery is now Hampton Park, named for a Confederate general, with the Union dead reinterred in the 1880s at a national cemetery in Beaufort. A historical marker now stands at Hampton Park naming what happened there on May 1, 1865.
The reason this story matters today is not only historical. It is theological.
Jesus stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth, the gospel for the third Sunday after Epiphany, and read from Isaiah 61. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.” The captives. The brokenhearted. The bruised. The Spirit of the Lord, Jesus said, was upon HIM to do this work.
On May 1, 1865, the captives had just been set at liberty. The bruised had just been freed. And the first thing they did with their freedom was to bury the dead who had died for them.
That is the Spirit moving.
Memorial Day was not begun by the powerful. It was begun by the freed. It was not founded on a battlefield victory but on a burial. It started because people the world had counted as nothing kept faith with people the world had also counted as nothing, and refused to let them be forgotten.
And it has carried the names of millions of dead for a hundred and sixty years.
This is what GOD does. The small faithful things outlast the people who do them. The work begun in silence by those without power becomes the tradition the powerful eventually adopt. The Spirit of the Lord is upon people who have no platform, no budget, no permission, and through them GOD does work that lasts longer than empires.
Tomorrow, when you stand at a cemetery, or hear taps played, or pause for the National Moment of Remembrance at three in the afternoon, remember where the tradition began. It began with ten thousand newly freed people in Charleston, three thousand Black schoolchildren carrying flowers, and a fence around a cemetery that read Martyrs of the Racecourse.
It began with people who had every reason to wait for someone else to do the work and chose not to wait.
The Spirit of the Lord was upon them.
The Spirit of the Lord is still on people like them today.
The names of the dead are still being kept by the people the world counts as nothing.
That is the work GOD honors.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.