African American Contributions to Memorial Day

“Louisiana furnished 24,000 Black men to help put down the rebellion. You talk about strewing flowers upon the graves of our departed Comrades. Who are the ones that do it down South but the Black people?” – Comrade Boyle of Louisiana, speaking before a national gathering of the Grand Army of the Republic, 1907.[1]

“The Constitution that governs us was sustained by the sword and bayonet. The Black soldier played an important part, and as an evidence of their valor, look at yonder graves.” – M.C Maxfield, speaking at a DC Memorial Day ceremony in 1911.[2]

The Origins of Memorial Day

At the April 1901 dedication of the General John A. Logan Memorial, speakers like President William McKinley and New York Senator Chauncey Depew spoke of the nation’s debt to General Logan for his General Order No.11, which in 1868 formalized the annual floral decoration of the graves on Memorial Day, also referred to as Decoration Day.[3] While there is a historical debate over where and when the very first observation of Memorial Day took place, one of the earliest recorded observations of the holiday indisputably took place in Charleston, South Carolina, in the closing days of the Civil War.

On May 1, 1865, the freed people of Charleston gathered at the old racetrack to decorate the graves of 257 Union prisoners of war who had been hastily buried by the retreating Confederate army. The largely African American crowd watched the men of the 35^th and 104^th United States Colored Troops (USCT), along with the men of the famed 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, perform drills before listening to speeches addressing the meaning of the long and bloody war. When the ceremonies were finished, the crowd dispersed to lay flowers on the graves of the men who had died fighting for Union and for liberty.[4]

The site of the first observance of Memorial Day.

Library of Congress, LC-DIG-stereo-1s01306.

African American Memorial Day Observations From Reconstruction to World War I

In the decades following the Civil War, the role of African Americans in the celebration of Memorial Day remained a large one, especially in the South. Throughout the Reconstruction era, African Americans made up the vast majority of the day’s observers in the South, as the decoration of Confederate graves was still policed by the occupying federal forces.[5] After Reconstruction’s end in 1877, African American orators used Memorial Day speeches to decry efforts to rehabilitate the Confederate cause. In 1878, speaking before a crowd of New York Union veterans on Decoration Day, Frederick Douglass proclaimed that “There was a right side and a wrong side in the late war which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget, and while today we should have malice toward none and charity toward all, it is no part of our duty to confound right with wrong, or loyalty with treason.”[6]

Through the 1880s and well into the 1910s, African American veterans claimed a prominent position in the observation of Memorial Day, with local Black Grand Army of the Republic posts regularly leading services in DC’s Columbian Harmony Cemetery.[7] When a Black G.A.R post was placed behind a white cadet brigade at the 1898 Uniontown, Pennsylvania Memorial Day parade, the Black veterans left the procession in protest – and there was such outrage that at the next year’s Memorial Day parade, that Black post marched at the head of the procession.[8]

In 1898, in the spirit of reconciliation between North and South, President McKinley opened the National Cemeteries to the Confederate war dead. In the aftermath of the Spanish American War and the First World War, Memorial Day grew to be a holiday that honored all American war dead, not just those that fell in defense of the Union.[9] Despite the reconciliatory mood of the country at large, many Union veterans, Black and white, believed that Memorial Day should exclusively honor the Union’s dead. The year prior to the dedication of General Logan’s statue, the Maryland Department of the Grand Army of the Republic refused an invitation from President McKinley and Governor John W. Smith to attend the Memorial Day dedication of the Maryland State Monument on the Antietam National Battlefield. The monument was dedicated to all Marylanders present at Antietam, both Confederate and Union, and Department Commander John R. King objected to the “perversion” of a holiday that “was a day set apart sacred to the memory of our own dead.”[10]

Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-132913.

A Hero's Final Celebration

Despite the marked increase in the commemoration of Memorial Day among White southerners at the turn of the century, the role of Black Civil War veterans in the observation of the holiday would persist until the final Black veteran of that war passed away. Joseph Clovese was born into slavery on a Louisiana plantation in January 1844. He fled in 1862, serving as an infantryman in the 63^rd United States Colored Infantry. Clovese was one of only six members of the G.A.R healthy enough to attend the organization’s final reunion in 1949. In May 1951, Clovese secured his release from a Michigan veteran’s hospital to take part in the local Memorial Day parade and Fourth of July celebrations. After participating in these traditions that dated back to his days in the Army, Clovese fell into a coma on July 9th, and died four days later at 107 years old. The final surviving Black veteran of the Civil War, Clovese was buried with full military honors and a 21-gun salute.[11]

Journal of the Eighty-Third National Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic, Indianapolis, Ind., August 28 to September 1, 1949. Page 30.

Interested in learning more? Read on:
Learn more about Major General John A. Logan
Learn more about the history of Memorial Day
Read about Memorial Day and the National Mall
Read an Ode to Memorial Day, written by Brigadier General Charles Young, the Army's highest ranking Black officer until his death in 1922.
Read about DC's Black Militias, the members of which often played a major role in Memorial Day observations.
Read about a Black Grand Army of the Republic Post in Massachusetts

[1]Journal of the Forty-First National Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., September 11^th and 12^th, 1907. 235.

[2]Washington Bee, June 3, 1911, 4:3.

[3]“Memorial Day Order,” May 5, 1868. Located at: https://www.cem.va.gov/history/memdayorder.asp

[4]Paul A. Shackel, A Memory in Black and White: Race, Commemoration, and the Post-Bellum Landscape (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2003) 25

[5]William A. Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) 72.

[6]Douglass, Frederick. Speech Delivered in Madison Square, New York, N.Y., Decoration Day 1878. Accessed 6/30/2023: https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss11879.23011

[7]Indianapolis Leader, June 3, 1882, 2:6-7; Richmond Planet, June 12, 1886, 1:2; Richmond Planet, June 2, 1894, 1:3; Washington Bee, June 6, 1908 5:2; Washington Bee, June 3, 1911 4:3.

[8]Barbara Gannon, “Sites of Memory, Sites of Glory: African American Grand Army of the Republic Posts in Pennsylvania,” in William Blair and William Pencak eds. Making and Remaking Pennsylvania’s Civil War (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001) 177.

[9]Blair, Cities of the Dead 185-190.

[10]David K. Graham, Loyalty on the Line: Civil War Maryland in American Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018) 71-73.

[11]Peg McNichol, “Remembering Michigan’s Last Civil War Soldier,” The Oakland Press, May 30, 2022. Accessed 6/30/2023: https://www.theoaklandpress.com/2022/05/30/remembering-michigans-last-civil-war-soldier/