Memorial Day Origins: Charleston Freedmen, Decoration Day and the Indy 500

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More than 600,000 military deaths in the Civil War shattered the Victorian ideal of a good death at home, and Americans improvised new rituals of mourning. Historian David Blight points to May 1, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, where freed Black residents reburied 257 Union soldiers from a mass grave at the Washington Race Course prison camp and about 10,000 people paraded and covered the graves with flowers. In March 1866 Mary Ann Williams of the Ladies Memorial Association in Columbus, Georgia, proposed April 26 for decorating Confederate graves, and in Columbus, Mississippi, women at Friendship Cemetery also decorated Union graves. In 1966 Lyndon B. Johnson named Waterloo, New York, the official birthplace anyway.

On May 5, 1868, John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic issued General Order No. 11 naming May 30 as Decoration Day, and over 180 cemeteries in 27 states took part that year. Many Southern states kept separate Confederate memorial days, some on Jefferson Davis's June 3 birthday, which the episode ties to the Lost Cause. After World War I the day expanded to all American war dead, with the poppy drawn from John McCrae's In Flanders Fields and championed by Moina Michael. The episode follows the 1911 dispute over holding the Indianapolis 500 on the day, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act passed in 1968 that created the three-day weekend, and the 2000 National Moment of Remembrance Act.

• Logan's wife's memoirs say May 30 was chosen because flowers would be in bloom across the North.
• The American Legion adopted the poppy in 1920.
• Older GAR veterans called the Indy 500 a desecration, while younger World War I veterans supported the race.
• On Memorial Day the flag flies at half-staff until noon, then is raised to full staff.
• The Veterans of Foreign Wars objected to the Monday holiday, and Congress later asked Americans to pause at 3 p.m. local time.