Emancipation Day | May 24, 2026 | Rev. Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey
- The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples
- May 24
- 8 min read
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of this terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.
Refrain:
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read the righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
His day is marching on.
[Refrain]
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat;
O be swift, my soul, to answer Him; be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
[Refrain]
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me;
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
while God is marching on.
[Refrain]
The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” with lyrics by Julia Ward Howe and sung to the melody of “John Browne’s Body” was considered the Union anthem during the Civil War. Memorial Day—the holiday that we celebrate tomorrow— is a day when we remember U.S. military personnel who died while serving their country.
The first national observance of what would become Memorial Day occurred on May 30, 1868. Then known as Decoration Day, the holiday was proclaimed by Commander-in-Chief John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic – a fraternal organization of veterans – to honor Union soldiers who had died in the American Civil War.
The Civil War killed more Americans than any other war in American history, including the World Wars of the 20th century. 620,000 is the estimate for troops Union plus Confederate, not counting either civilians or colored refugees. Colored troops fought in this war for their freedom also and died more frequently per capita than whites. According to W.E.B. Dubois, the colored involvement made the difference that won the war for the North. They also did other things that seemed to indicate that they took the words “die to make men free” in the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” seriously.
In the late 1990s historians learned about a Memorial Day commemoration organized by a group of Black people freed from enslavement less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865. David Blight, a professor of history and Black studies at Yale University, was researching a book on the Civil War when he encountered a file labeled ‘First Decoration Day,’ in a Harvard Library.
“And inside on a piece of cardboard was a narrative handwritten by an old veteran, plus a date referencing an article in The New York Tribune. That narrative told the essence of the story that he ended up telling in his book (Race and Reunion) of a march on the racetrack (less than a month after the confederacy surrendered) in 1865,” wrote Dave Roos in an article on the History website. Roos continued,
The racetrack in question was the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club in Charleston, South Carolina. In the late stages of the Civil War, the Confederate army transformed the formerly posh country club into a makeshift prison for Union captives. More than 260 Union soldiers died from disease and exposure while being held in the racetrack’s open-air infield. Their bodies were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstands.
When Charleston fell and Confederate troops evacuated the badly damaged city, Black people 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 racetrack. 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.
If the news reports are accurate, the 1865 gathering at the Charleston racetrack would be the earliest mass Memorial Day commemoration on record. Blight excitedly called the Avery Institute of Afro-American History and Culture at the College of Charleston, looking for more information on the historic event.
“‘I’ve never heard of it,’ they told me,” says Blight. “‘This never happened.’”
But it was clear from the newspaper reports that a Memorial Day observance was organized by freed slaves in Charleston at least a year before other U.S. cities and three years before the first national observance. How had this been lost to history for over a century?…
Once the war was over and Charleston was rebuilt in the 1880s, the city’s white residents likely had little interest in remembering an event held by former enslaved people to celebrate the Union dead. “That didn’t fit their version of what the war was all about,” Blight says.
In time, the old horse track and country club were torn down, and thanks to a gift from a wealthy Northern patron, the Union soldiers’ graves were moved from the humble white-fenced graveyard in Charleston to the Beaufort National Cemetery. By the time Blight was rummaging through the Harvard archives in 1996, the story of the first Memorial Day had been entirely forgotten.
Or perhaps not entirely.
After his book Race and Reunion was published in 2001, Blight gave a talk about Memorial Day at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. After he finished, an older Black woman approached him.
“You mean that story is true?” the woman asked Blight. “I grew up in Charleston, and my granddaddy used to tell us this story of a parade at the old racetrack, and we never knew whether to believe him or not. You mean that’s true?”
For Blight, it’s less important whether the 1865 commemoration of the “Martyrs of the Race Course” is officially recognized as the first Memorial Day.
“It’s the fact that this occurred in Charleston at a cemetery site for the Union dead in a city where the Civil War had begun,” Blight says, “and that it was organized and done by African American former slaves is what gives it such poignancy.”
Interestingly, both the North and South considered themselves to be fighting a religious crusade, from within the same religion—even within the same denominations as in the case of Methodists and Baptists.
The north fought for emancipation as declared in the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The south fought for a Christian Nationalist freedom to enslave, according to Harry S. Stout, Professor of History, Religious Studies at Yale Divinity School. Stout wrote,
For the South, this “chosen” status not only presumed ultimate victory in what would turn out to be a long and bloody conflict, but also put God’s imprimatur on the Confederate national identity. In fact, the South claimed to be a uniquely Christian nation. The new Confederate Constitution, adopted on February 8, 1861, and ratified on March 11, 1861, officially declared its Christian identity, “invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God.” Southern leaders chose as their national motto Deo Vindice (“God will avenge”). Confederate President Jefferson Davis proclaimed that the time had come “to recognize our dependence upon God … [and] supplicate his merciful protection.” This national acknowledgment of religious dependence, as the South frequently pointed out during the war in both the religious and the secular press, stood in stark contrast to the “godless” government of the North that ignored God in its constitution and put secular concerns above the sacred duties of Christian service and the divine commission….
But the nationalist religious grouping of the southerners limited potential for community, regardless of which religious doctrine or dogma. Biblically, for instance, the enslaved saw themselves as the children of Israel escaping slavery in the Exodus story.
By the late-1870s’ white reconciliation of blue and grey became the goal and the enemy became reconstruction. So reconstruction was abandoned in the 1870s, and by the 50th anniversary Jim Crow segregation deepened and lynching persisted, as the nation also entered into WWI. Jim Crow continued through the hundredth anniversary into the new Jim Crow of massive incarceration. Blight wrote in the epilogue of his book,
Human reconciliations—when tragically divided people unify again around aspirations, ideas, and the positive bonds of nationalism—are to be cherished. But sometimes reconciliations have terrible costs, both intentional and unseen. The sectional reunion after so horrible a civil war was a political triumph by the late nineteenth century, but it could not have been achieved without the resubjugation of many of those people whom the war had freed from centuries of bondage. This is the tragedy lingering on the margins and infesting the heart of American history from Appomattox to World War I.
For many whites, especially veterans and their family members, healing from the war was simply not the same proposition as doing justice to the four million emancipated slaves and their descendants. On the other hand, a simple justice, a fair chance to exercise their basic rights, and secure access to land and livelihood were all most blacks ever demanded of Reconstruction and beyond. They sought no official apologies for slavery, only protection, education, human recognition, a helping hand….
In the wake of the Civil War, there were no “Truth and Reconciliation” commissions through which to process memories of either slavery or the experience of total war.
Defeated white Southerners and black former slaves faced each other on the ground, seeing and knowing the awful chasm between their experiences, unaware that any path would lead to their reconciliation. Yankee and Confederate soldiers, however, would eventually find a smoother path to bonds of fraternalism and mutual glory.
So what of the tremendous sacrifice of life, what does it mean without emancipation? If they didn’t “die to make men free”, what did they die for? What is the purpose of the new union?
So perhaps there is a new thought for this coming and maybe future memorial days. Maybe it’s remembering the first contemporaneously documented observance of “decoration day.” That’s what the war was about.
Remembering that seems to remedy the morbid curiosity of countless and ongoing reenactments of Civil War battles … as if trying to re-cast a tragedy with a happy ending, as Blight suggested? … as if more than a million military casualties (not even counting civilians) is a happier ending than one emancipation day?
The latter of course would require expanding the official community to the reality that seems to be called for. As Thurman wrote, "Community cannot for long feed on itself; it can only flourish with the coming of others from beyond, their unknown and undiscovered brothers."
In 1893, Julia spoke on “What is Religion?” and included the following on the “unknown and undiscovered” sisters as well:
I think nothing is religion which puts one individual absolutely above others, and surely nothing is religion which puts one sex above another...any religion which will sacrifice a certain set of human beings for the enjoyment or aggrandizement or advantage of another is no religion. It is a thing which may be allowed, but it is against true religion.
So now as the voting rights act has been gutted and human existence in general is threatened both by war and environmental warming, perhaps all there is to say is that “Community cannot for long feed on itself; it can only flourish with the coming of others from beyond, their unknown and undiscovered brothers” and sisters.
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