Opinion: What a true Memorial Day celebration looks like

While it's unlikely anyone can say with certainty what were the origins of America’s Memorial Day, it is generally accepted that the custom of decorating graves in remembrance of the war dead began after the Civil War, among families of fallen Confederate soldiers. But the historian David W. Blight makes an argument that the first such observance was in fact the work of newly freed Black people seeking to honor the 40,000 African American soldiers who died in the war. The tribute consisted of elaborate ceremonies, parades, prayers, scripture readings and speeches. The Black soldiers deserved the honor: They gave their lives for the most American of causes, freedom and Union. It’s good, though, that they had such attention lavished on them then, because fairly soon afterward, they faded from much of the nation’s memory, as did their cause.

Instead, over time in the late 19th century, many such observances of this day of remembrance became occasions for unreconstructed Confederates to advance what became known as the Lost Cause, a willful displacement of actual history by a mythology meant to justify the rebellion and all but deify its leaders. They portrayed Southern soldiers as chivalrous and brave but unable to overcome Yankee numbers and industrial might. They spoke of a Southern “nation” united against Northern “aggression,” and of the happiness and contentment of their enslaved “servants.” The military genius of Robert E. Lee and the virtue and necessity of white supremacy were extolled.

Missing from most versions of this tale was any semblance of reality, including such things as the opposition to secession shared by many thousands of southern Whites who benefited little or not at all from the slave economy. The horrors of slavery were all but ignored. The great tragedy was that so much of this myth made its way into the public consciousness, North and South, contributing to a century of repression and racial discrimination that mocked Abraham Lincoln’s hope — voiced among the soldiers’ graves at Gettysburg — that their deaths would not be in vain but would bring a new birth of freedom.