Memorial Day's Black Roots - Charleston, South Carolina

Here's a link to Forgetting Why We Remember, a powerful op-ed in the New York Times about the origin of Memorial Day, and how it is more than just "a holiday devoted to department store sales, half-marathons, picnics, baseball and auto racing":

Formerly known as Decoration Day, which was first recorded to have been observed by Freedmen (freed enslaved southern blacks) in Charleston, South Carolina in 1865, at the Washington Race Course, to remember the fallen Union soldiers of the Civil War.

Digby at Hullabaloo discusses, in The First Memorial Day, the extent to which American history and black history are intertwined.