As Africans formerly enslaved in the Americas, Black people’s legacy and struggle for freedom and liberation are tied up with the narrative of the United States of America. When we lack a full understanding of our history, we can unknowingly advance the project of imperialism and US settler colonialism by telling Black liberation stories as US nationalist narratives. 

It’s for this reason I hold up what’s come to be called Memorial Day as a day of abolition and emancipation. A day for Black people to reflect on our relationship to this piece of Earth, known by many as the United States of America, and our efforts to decolonize, liberate ourselves and transform our suffering. When we, Black people, focus on celebrating US nationalism on Memorial Day, we miss out on the opportunities to honor and expand the work of abolition and liberatory possibility that were passed down from Black people and their white accomplices in their original celebration of the day. 

First celebrated on May 1st, 1865, months after the end of the US Civil War, Decoration Day, as it was originally called, was attended by over ten thousand Black children, women, men and white people. Held in Charleston, SC, the event was coordinated by Black folks who had become the primary residents of the city after white abandonment. Newspapers such as the Charleston Daily Courier and the New York Tribune reported on the events. According to historian David Blight, twenty-eight Black workmen had reburied 257 Union soldiers who had been held as prisoners of war and left in shoddy graves behind Washington Race Course and Jockey Club. They reorganized the graves, built and painted a fence to create a cemetery upon the former planter’s horse race track and constructed an archway above it with the inscription: “Martyrs of the Race Course”. 

The day of celebration opened with over three thousand children singing “John Brown’s Body” and carrying roses to the gravesite. Along with these floral offerings to decorate the graves of martyrs, there were nearly 30 speeches by invited guests, displays by three Black and white infantry, spirituals and national songs, as well as food and picnics. For Black folks, the end of the war marked the end of their bondage in slavery and the beginning of a new course that they would begin in Charleston and the US. Decoration Day then holds multiple meanings and layers, including that of the inscription above the cemetery entrance. 

Washington Race Course, in Charleston, SC, doubles as a site of tribute and a symbol of the race course which captive Africans were set on under enslavement. The course that Black folks have been set on as human beings held under, traded in and treated as property. The course resisted by those who have given themselves in the struggle to abolish racialization, anti-Black racism and white supremacy. And certainly the race track once owned by Charlestonian planters, now abandoned and reclaimed by freed Black folks in service of this first Decoration Day. The “Martyrs of the race course” is no small inscription, then, in a place such as Charleston, South Carolina. 

Charleston is and was one of the jewels of the confederacy. South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union on December 20, 1860 after the election of Abraham Lincoln. One month after Lincoln won, Charleston hosted the secession convention with the call to other southern states to join "a great Slaveholding Confederacy, stretching its arms over a territory larger than any power in Europe possesses". Now fallen and abandoned by whites, freed Black folks began laying their mark on this land by surfacing the bodies of Black folks and Union soldiers to honor them. 

Imagine, burying the bodies of Black freedom fighters and emancipators, and their white Union allies and accomplices, in the soil of the confederate capital. Soil that was first marked and tended by Indigenous peoples. And adorning these grave sites with flowers, songs, prayers and psalms to consecrate them. Imagine! In white-abandoned Charleston. On a race track that, not unlike the Broeck racetrack in Savannah, GA, was a place for selling Black, African flesh and bodies. 

Another sign of the abolitionist intentions of the ten thousand plus gathered on May 1, 1865, is the choice of the opening song, “John Brown’s body”. Supposedly named for a young Scotsman of the same name in the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, the song also doubled as a battle hymn in honor of John Brown who committed his life and family to the cause of ending slavery and freeing enslaved peoples. 

Before being sentenced to death for his commitment and attempt to abolish slavery by any means necessary, including bearing arms, John Brown addressed the crowd present at his sentencing hearing:

I believe to have interfered as I have done, . . . in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it be deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit: so let it be done.

A fierce and righteous abolitionist, Brown pledged his life, his work, his family and his purpose to stopping the spread of slavery in his hometown of Osawatomie, Kansas, in the western territories and by raising a small army to free those still in bondage. Oft remembered for his raid on Harper’s Ferry, VA, this abolitionist hero, and those who sacrificed their lives to free the enslaved, were the subject of that opening song,  “John Brown’s Body,” sung by over 3,000 Black children during the first Decoration Day ceremony. 

These significant details of the first Memorial Day ceremony as well as the well-founded reality of how African descended people signify on whiteness – i.e., layer speech or words with multiple meanings – shows Decoration Day was about celebrating the end of slavery and Black liberation efforts. They were celebrating and honoring the sacrifice of white men such as Brown of Kansas, John Brown of Massachusetts and all the Union soldiers, and Black fighters, who fought for their emancipation. These are among the reasons we can reclaim and celebrate Decoration Day, and what is now called Memorial Day, as an abolitionist hol(y)day. 

Memorial Day has come to mean national sacrifice and patriotism through no small act of deliberate white erasure, but we err when we, liberators, freedom fighters and abolitionists, align our stories and efforts with national patriotism. The vision of liberation that Black folks fought for and are fighting for is not America. The vision of full human dignity and self-determination is not yet realized. This. Is. Not. It. This is not the course that folks martyred themselves for. 

Rather than continue to obfuscate our liberation narratives, I invite us, abolitionists and liberators, to consider reclaiming the day for its original intent: to honor and consecrate the lives of our freedom fighters. I also invite us to move beyond the need to signify and to unapologetically lift up Decoration Day as a radical Black tradition that honors the sacrifices Black and white folks have made in service of liberation. Let’s lift up Gen. Harriet Tubman, Ida B Wells, Claudia Jones, John Brown of Kansas, and the many today who call for abolition of the US empire, imperialism and settler colonialism. 

The victory of the Black folks enslaved in the United States is part of a Black liberation trajectory that includes all of the Americas (the Caribbean, mezo-America and South America). Wherever Africans have been oppressed and fought to decolonize and liberate ourselves. Wherever Indigenous populations have been dispossessed, displaced and disrupted. This land, this soil, this Memorial Day does not belong to white people nor the American settler colonial project and narrative. Let us disrupt this national narrative of patriotic mourning and misremembering. Let us stand in our legacies of abolition, emancipation and celebration.

Memorial Day is part of our Black Radical Tradition. It’s a day to honor the martyrs, liberators and abolitionists who have sought to change this race course. If America and Americans are gonna erase and hijack our commemorative celebrations, we must not, at least, participate in the denial of our freedom projects by misremembering with them. And we don’t have to follow them on this imperialist course of appropriating our rituals. Distinguishing what is our story and what’s theirs is an essential part of decolonizing and reclaiming the ways we have and continue to imagine liberation.