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How “Decoration Day” in May 1865, Held by African Americans in South Carolina Led to Memorial Day

How “Decoration Day” in May 1865, Held by African Americans in South Carolina Led to Memorial Day

By goodblacknews on May 30, 2022

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

On Memorial Day 2022, we take a look at the African American origins of the federal holiday established to remember America’s fallen soldiers.

To read about it, read on. To hear about it, press PLAY:

[You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.com or create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website. Full transcript below]:

Hey, this is Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and Editor-in-Chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Monday, May 30th, 2022, which is also Memorial Day, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.

Although May 30, 1868 is cited as the first national commemoration of Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery, events lead by African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina to decorate the graves of fallen Civil War soldiers occurred on May 1, 1865, less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered.

Reports of this early version of Memorial Day or “Decoration Day” as it was called, were rediscovered in the Harvard University archives in the late 1990s by historian David Blight, author of the 2018 biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.

To quote from history.com:

When Charleston fell and Confederate troops evacuated the badly damaged city, those freed from enslavement remained. One of the first things those emancipated men and women did was to give the fallen Union prisoners a proper burial. They exhumed the mass grave and reinterred the bodies in a new cemetery with a tall, whitewashed fence inscribed with the words: “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

And then on May 1, 1865, something even more extraordinary happened. According to two reports that Blight found in The New York Tribune and The Charleston Courier, a crowd of 10,000 people, mostly freed slaves with some white missionaries, staged a parade around the race track.

Three thousand Black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and sang “John Brown’s Body.” Members of the famed 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments were in attendance and performed double-time marches. Black ministers recited verses from the Bible.

Despite the size of the gathering and newspaper coverage, the memory of this event was “suppressed by white Charlestonians in favor of their own version of the day,” Blight stated in the New York Times in 2011.

On May 31, 2010, near a reflecting pool at Hampton Park, the city of Charleston reclaimed this history by installing a plaque commemorating the site as the place where Blacks held the first Memorial Day on May 1, 1865.

During the dedication of the plaque, the city’s mayor at the time, Joe Riley, was present to celebrate the historic occasion which included a brass band and a reenactment of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment.

In 2017, the City of Charleston erected yet another sign reclaiming the history and commemorating the event:

“On May 1, 1865 a parade to honor the Union war dead took place here. The event marked the earliest celebration of what became known as “Memorial Day.” The crowd numbered in the thousands, with African American school children from newly formed Freedmen’s Schools leading the parade. They were followed by church leaders, Freedpeople, Unionists, and members of the 54th Massachusetts 34th and 104th U.S. Colored Infantries. The dead were later reinterred in Beaufort.”

To learn more about African Americans’ role in the creation of Memorial Day, check out the links to sources provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.

This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, written, produced and hosted by me, Lori Lakin Hutcherson.

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Harriet Tubman Inducted into Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame; Back on Track to Grace the $20 Bill

Harriet Tubman Inducted into Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame; Back on Track to Grace the $20 Bill

By goodblacknews on February 13, 2021

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

On Veteran’s Day in 2018, I posted the following to the Good Black News Facebook Page with the photo above:

This is Harriet Tubman in her later years. She lived into her early 90s and of course is best known for leading over 400 enslaved people to freedom as a conductor on the Underground Railroad.

What is less well known is that during the Civil War she worked as a scout and spy for the Union Army, and was the first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war by guiding the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 slaves.

So GBN honors this Veteran on Veteran’s Day (observed), her grit, her bravery, her purpose. A true American hero who should be on our $20 already!! #patriot#americanhero #veteransday

As this nation continues to reckon with so much of its unexamined history, it is heartening to report that according to The Washington Post, Harriet Tubman has been inducted into the Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame.

The conceptual design of a new $20 note produced by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing during the Obama Administration depicting Harriet Tubman.

Additionally, the Biden administration committed in late January to speed up the process to get Tubman on the $20 bill as the Obama administration sought to do by the year 2020 (the plan was not carried out by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

This week, Senators Jeanne Shaheen (D) and Ben Sasse (R) in a show of bipartisanship sent a letter to current Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to make the case that America’s currency should reflect the diversity of the nation.

No date for the issue of the Tubman $20 has been released as of this publication. Update to come.

National Museum of African American History and Culture Explains the Legacy of Juneteenth

National Museum of African American History and Culture Explains the Legacy of Juneteenth

By goodblacknews on June 19, 2020

Happy Juneteenth 2020!

Today Good Black News wants to share the excellent online resources the National Museum of African American History and Culture has that explain and explore the legacy of Juneteenth, which is now in its 155th year. Click here for more and read below for an historical overview of Juneteenth:

On “Freedom’s Eve,” or the eve of January 1, 1863, the first Watch Night services took place. On that night, enslaved and free African Americans gathered in churches and private homes all across the country awaiting news that the Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect.

At the stroke of midnight, prayers were answered as all enslaved people in Confederate States were declared legally free. Union soldiers, many of whom were black, marched onto plantations and across cities in the south reading small copies of the Emancipation Proclamation spreading the news of freedom in Confederate States. Only through the Thirteenth Amendment did emancipation end slavery throughout the United States.

But not everyone in Confederate territory would immediately be free. Even though the Emancipation Proclamation was made effective in 1863, it could not be implemented in places still under Confederate control.

As a result, in the westernmost Confederate state of Texas, enslaved people would not be free until much later. Freedom finally came on June 19, 1865, when some 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas. The army announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved black people in the state, were free by executive decree. This day came to be known as “Juneteenth,” by the newly freed people in Texas.

The post-emancipation period known as Reconstruction (1865-1877) marked an era of great hope, uncertainty, and struggle for the nation as a whole. Formerly enslaved people immediately sought to reunify families, establish schools, run for political office, push radical legislation and even sue slaveholders for compensation. Given the 200+ years of enslavement, such changes were nothing short of amazing. Not even a generation out of slavery, African Americans were inspired and empowered to transform their lives and their country.

Juneteenth celebration in 1900 at Eastwoods Park. (Credit: Austin History Center)

Juneteenth marks our country’s second independence day. Although it has long celebrated in the African American community, this monumental event remains largely unknown to most Americans.

The historical legacy of Juneteenth shows the value of never giving up hope in uncertain times. The National Museum of African American History and Culture is a community space where this spirit of hope lives on. A place where historical events like Juneteenth are shared and new stories with equal urgency are told.

To learn more: https://nmaahc.si.edu/sites/default/files/images/juneteenthresources_final.pdf

For Juneteenth online events: https://nmaahc.si.edu/event/juneteenth-celebration-resilience

HISTORY: Meet Robert Smalls, Boat Captain for Union Navy who Escaped Slavery and Became 1st African-American Elected to U.S. Congress

By goodblacknews on November 11, 2019
U.S. Naval Captain and U.S. Congress Member Robert Smalls (photo via Library of Congress)

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

On this Veteran’s Day, Good Black News is choosing to honor former Union Navy boat captain and oft-hidden historical figure Robert Smalls of South Carolina.

Robert Smalls was the first black man elected to U.S. Congress during Reconstruction. He was born into slavery in 1839 in Beaufort, S.C., and started his remarkable, implausible journey to national prominence by daring to escape slavery during the Civil War with his family. 

Smalls, like many other enslaved peoples, was made to work for the Confederate forces during the Civil War. Menial labor such as grave digging, cooking, digging trenches, etc. were the most common jobs, but some enslaved peoples were used in skilled labor positions, such as Smalls, who could navigate the waters in and around Charleston, so was used to guide transport ships for the Confederate Navy.

On May 13, 1862, Smalls convinced several other enslaved people to help him commandeer a Confederate transport ship, the CSS Planter, in Charleston harbor. Smalls sailed from Confederate-controlled waters to the U.S. blockade.

By doing so, not only did he gain freedom for himself, several enslaved peoples and members of his family, his example of cunning and bravery helped convince President Abraham Lincoln to accept black soldiers into the U.S. Army and Navy. Check out PBS video about this event below:

https://youtu.be/igMM_vhb3cA

Smalls became Captain of the same boat for the Union Navy and helped free enslaved peoples as he fought and outwitted the Confederate Navy several more times during the duration of the War. After the South surrendered, Smalls returned to Beaufort, S.C. and purchased his master’s house, which was seized by the Union in 1863. His master sued to get it back, but lost in court to Smalls.

BOOKS: New Biography “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” Focuses on the Man and his Voice

BOOKS: New Biography “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” Focuses on the Man and his Voice

By goodblacknews on November 11, 2018

by Jennifer Szalai via nytimes.com

Time has a way of sanding off the rough edges of historical memory, turning even the most convulsive, contentious lives into opportunities for national triumphalism and self-congratulation. With “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” the historian David W. Blight wants to enrich our understanding of an American in full who, for more than half his life, wasn’t even legally recognized as such. Now that Douglass is enshrined on his pedestal, shorn of what made him “thoroughly and beautifully human,” Blight notes how the “old fugitive slave” has been “adopted by all elements in the political spectrum,” eager to claim him as their own.

Plenty has been written about Douglass in the 200 years since he was born, not least by Douglass himself, who recounted his life story in three autobiographies — a paper trail of memoirs that Blight deems “both a pleasure and peril” for the biographer. In tracing an arc from bondage to freedom, Douglass cast himself as a “self-made hero,” Blight writes, while leaving “a great deal unsaid.” A number of other books have filled in the gaps — exploring Douglass’s relationships with the women in his life, for instance, as well as his fraught and transformative friendship with Abraham Lincoln — but Blight’s is the first major biography of Douglass in nearly three decades, making ample use of materials in the private collection of a retired doctor named Walter O. Evans to illuminate Douglass’s later years, after the Civil War.

Blight, who has edited and annotated volumes of Douglass’s autobiographies, undertakes this project with the requisite authority and gravity. The result is comprehensive, scholarly, sober; Blight is careful to tell us what cannot be known, including the persistent mystery of Douglass’s father (who was most likely white, and may have been Frederick’s mother’s owner). On the stuff that’s known, Blight is an attentive if sometimes fastidious guide, poring over speeches and texts with the critical equivalent of a magnifying glass. Douglass, Blight says, was a “man of words,” making this book “the biography of a voice.”

That voice took shape and sharpened over time, but it would return again and again to the banks of the Tuckahoe River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born in 1818. Twenty years a slave, then almost nine years a fugitive; as Douglass himself described it in his autobiographies (having adopted his new surname from a Sir Walter Scott poem), the first decades of his life were both thrilling and terrifying. Until his abolitionist allies helped to purchase his freedom in 1846, everything he did felt provisional; he lived with the incessant fear of someone who could be plunged back into captivity at any moment.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/books/review-frederick-douglass-prophet-of-freedom-david-blight.html

Cudjo Lewis, Last Survivor of Transatlantic Slave Trade, Has His Story Told in 'Barracoon' a Posthumous Book by Zora Neale Hurston to be Published in May 2018

Cudjo Lewis, Last Survivor of Transatlantic Slave Trade, Has His Story Told in 'Barracoon' a Posthumous Book by Zora Neale Hurston to be Published in May 2018

By goodblacknews on December 23, 2017

Zora Neale Hurston (l), Cudjo Lewis (r) [photo via blackyouthproject.com]
by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)
According to Newsone.com, the published work of literary giant Zora Neale Hurston (Of Mules and Men, Their Eyes Were Watching God) will expand in 2018 with the posthumous release of a new non-fiction book in May, Melville House reported.
The book—titled Barracoon—is an anthropological work on Cudjo Lewis; the last known person to survive the transatlantic slave trade between Africa and the United States. Nearly 90 years ago, Hurston traveled to Plateau, Alabama, and listened to Lewis—who was in his early 90s—recount his heart-wrenching experiences. Hurston went back and forth to Plateau over the course of four years. During her visits, Lewis shared memories about his upbringing in Africa, dark details about being captured, and his voyage to America on the Clotilde ship.
Lewis also spoke to Hurston about the perils of being an enslaved man in America and how his life changed following the Civil War. After gaining his freedom, Lewis and other former enslaved peoples cultivated a community in Alabama which was later landmarked and recognized as the Africatown Historic District. According to Bustle, Lewis was also featured in a short film created by Hurston in 1928; making him the only former bondsman born in Africa to be featured on a movie reel.
Harper Collins described the book as a piece that “brilliantly illuminates the tragedy of slavery and one life forever defined by it” and “an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.”
To pre-order Barracoon, click below:

Civil Rights and War Hero Octavius Catto to Become Philadelphia's 1st African American Honored With a Public Statue

Civil Rights and War Hero Octavius Catto to Become Philadelphia's 1st African American Honored With a Public Statue

By goodblacknews on August 17, 2017

This model of the Octavius V. Catto Memorial shows the statue, pillars and ballot box elements that will make up the $1.75 million project. (photo via phillyvoice.com)

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)
According to blavity.com, Octavius Valentine Catto will be honored with a statue outside of Philadelphia’s city hall this September. Catto’s statue will be the first monument built to honor an African American erected on public land in the City of Brotherly Love. Although Catto’s memorial has been in the works for years, in the wake of the push to take so many Confederate statues down across the nation, the timing for this statue’s unveiling could not be better.
In Charleston, South Carolina on February 22, 1839, Catto was born a free black man. Catto excelled at his studies, attending a school for black children in Philadelphia, the Institute for Colored Youth, an institution he later led.
According to phillyvoice.com, in his early 20s, Catto was already an active leader in the African American community. He was a member of the 4th Ward Black Political Club, the Union League Association, the Library Company and the Franklin Institute. He demanded that African Americans fight in the Civil War and helped get their regiments inducted into the war. In 1863, at the height of the Civil War, he joined the army and enlisted as a volunteer in defense of the state of Pennsylvania.
Octavius Catto (photo via phillyvoice.com)

Catto was also a major in the Pennsylvania National Guard and played baseball as captain and second baseman for the Pythians, an African American baseball team. He was inducted into the Negro League Baseball Museum’s Hall of Fame.
Beyond being an educator, ball player and a war hero, Philadelphia is celebrating Catto for his local civil rights activism, which went into full gear after he was kicked off of a segregated horse-drawn trolley. He staged a sit-in on the streetcars, refusing to move off of the car. The driver drove the car off of its track and unhitched its horses, unsure how else to get rid of Catto. Catto remained aboard; the other passengers and the driver left him there. Catto also defended several black women who were forcibly ejected from the city’s streetcars, and used a fine levied against his fiancée to drum up publicity for his cause. Finally, in 1867, due in large part to Catto’s pressure, the city desegregated its streetcars.
“In Philadelphia, at that time, you could be wearing a Civil War uniform and not have been able to get on that trolley car,” said Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, who has been hoping to bring a statue of Catto to the city since at least 2003, after he learned the story of Catto’s life. “[Knowing this] you realize, this struggle isn’t just a 1960s struggle. It’s a struggle from the beginning of the country.”

Black Parents Sue Mississippi for ‘Inequitable’ Schools with Help of Southern Poverty Law Center

By goodblacknews on May 23, 2017

(photo via naacpms.org)

by thegrio.com
The Southern Poverty Law Center filed suit in federal court on Tuesday alleging that the poor performance of black students in Mississippi is the direct result of the state’s failure to live up to the terms of readmission to the Union at the end of the Civil War.
As part of the terms of readmission, Mississippi was required to create a “uniform system of free public schools” for all citizens, both black and white, in order to foster an environment of education that was necessary to democracy.“ Today, Mississippi schools are anything but uniform,” said Will Bardwell, a lawyer at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“If you’re a kid in Mississippi, your chances of getting a good education depend largely on whether your school is mostly white or mostly black. That is not a uniform system.”
However, the state constitution changed several times until in 1890 it allowed only for “separate but equal” systems. According to the complaint, the constitution is now an “empty shell of the guarantee that Congress obligated Mississippi to preserve in 1870” and allows the state to severely underfund schools that serve African-American students.
To read more, go to: Black parents sue Mississippi for ‘inequitable’ schools | theGrio

National Museum of African-American History and Culture To Become Five-Story Screen to Show 3D “Commemorate and Celebrate Freedom” Video Nov. 16-18

By goodblacknews on November 1, 2015
NMAAHC
The completed building of the National Museum of African American History and Culture will be transformed into a lively display one year before it opens. (National Museum of African American History and Culture)

The building of the National Museum of African American History and Culture is now complete, with interior work underway. Now marks the final countdown to the museum’s grand opening next Fall (exact dates have not yet been announced). Though an actual visit to the long-awaited museum is still many weeks away, visitors to the National Mall next month will get a taste of what’s to come when the museum’s façade will be transformed into a lively and spectacular display of video, music and light.

When the sun goes down each evening between November 16 and 18, the museum’s south exterior, facing Madison Drive, and its west exterior, on 15th Street near the Washington Monument, will be illuminated by a seven-minute video, entitled “Commemorate and Celebrate Freedom.” Produced by the renowned filmmakers Stanley J. Nelson and Marcia Smith of Firelight Media, and animated by Quixotic Entertainment, the video projection will transform the museum into a five-story, block-long 3D canvas, according to museum officials.
“What we wanted to do was to metaphorically have the museum speak even before we open next year,” says Kinshasha Holman Conwill, deputy director of the museum.
“And the signal design element for our building is the corona: the three-tiered bronze colored element that has references in African sculpture and African American life and that identifies this building as something unique on the Mall. So to project on to that façade really gave us that opportunity to make the museum speak.”
The display, which the museum’s director Lonnie Bunch has called a “dynamic event,” will be accompanied by a soundtrack of historical music and spoken word, and will pay tribute to three significant moments in history: the culmination of the Civil War with the surrender at Appomattox on April 8, 1865; ratification of the 13th Amendment, which officially ended the institution of slavery on December 5, 1865; and the passage of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965.
“One of the things that [the film connects] to is the notion and the vision that the museum would be a place for those who already revel in African American history and culture,” says Conwill. “But most importantly,” she adds that the museum seeks to also provide a unique “lens into what it means to be an American and that those milestones in American history, as viewed through that lens, really amplifies that notion.”
On its opening night, November 16, the state-of-the-art digital projection imagery will also be accompanied by a live, outdoor program, produced and directed by Ricardo Khan, former artistic director of the Tony Award-winning Crossroads Theatre Co. Actor Erik Todd Dellums will serve as master of the ceremonies, which will include remarks by other dignitaries, including Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser; and U.S. Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton.

Viola Davis Developing Harriet Tubman Movie at HBO

By goodblacknews on April 27, 2015
Viola Davis Developing Harriet Tubman Movie
Viola Davis (BARRY KING/GETTY IMAGES)

Viola Davis is attached to star in an HBO telepic about the life of Harriet Tubman, the activist who helped devise a system that allowed hundreds of slaves to escape to freedom via the Underground Railroad.
Davis is developing the project with Amblin TV and writer Kirk Ellis, who has penned historical projects for HBO including its “John Adams” miniseries, and “Entourage” exec producer Doug Ellin. The untitled movie is based on the book “Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero” by Kate Clifford Larson.
Davis is executive producing with her partner and husband, Julius Tennon; Amblin’s Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank; Ellin; Jim Lefkowitz; and Cliff Dorfman.
The movie is in the early development stage and has not been given the go-ahead for production. But  it’s eyed for filming during Davis’ hiatus next year from her hit ABC drama “How to Get Away With Murder.”
Tubman became an American icon as a woman who escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1849 and helped organize a network of safe houses to help her relatives. She eventually helped hundreds of slaves to secure their freedom and became the most famous “conductor” on the network.  During the Civil War, Tubman served with the Union Army as a cook and a nurse, but she was eventually pressed into service as a spy.
Tubman is not the only African-American historical figure that Davis has sought to portray onscreen. The actress has been developing a feature film based on the life of pioneering congresswoman Barbara Jordan.
article by Cynthia Littleton via Variety.com