Current Events > The Black roots of Memorial Day

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https://www.history.com/news/8-things-you-may-not-know-about-memorial-day

While the first commemorative Memorial Day events werent held in the United States until the late 19th century, the practice of honoring those who have fallen in battle dates back thousands of years.

Three weeks after the Confederate surrender, an unusual procession entered a former POW camp: On May 1, 1865, more than 1,000 recently freed slaves, accompanied by regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops (including the Massachusetts 54th Infantry) and a handful of white Charlestonians, gathered in the camp to consecrate a new, proper burial site for the Union dead. The group sang hymns, gave readings and distributed flowers around the cemetery, which they dedicated to the Martyrs .

In May 1868, General John A. Logan, the commander-in-chief of the Union veterans group known as the Grand Army of the Republic, issued a decree that May 30 should become a nationwide day of commemoration for the more than 620,000 soldiers killed in the recently ended Civil War. On Decoration Day, as Logan dubbed it, Americans should lay flowers and decorate the graves of the war dead whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land.
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I still dislike the term "Union Army". There was the US Army and there were traitors in that war.
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