Risky History | Episode 1: Martyrs of the Race Course

Everyone thinks they know where Memorial Day came from.

They're wrong.

The first Memorial Day was not ordered by a general. It was not created by Congress. It was not born at Arlington National Cemetery. It was created on May 1st, 1865, by freed Black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina — people who had been enslaved just weeks before — at a Confederate racetrack that had been used as a prison camp for Union soldiers.

Two dozen freed Black men spent ten days exhuming a mass grave, reburying 257 Union soldiers in individual marked graves, and building a ten-foot fence above which they placed four words: Martyrs of the Race Course. Then 10,000 people gathered — most of them formerly enslaved — led by 3,000 Black schoolchildren carrying flowers.

That was the first Memorial Day.

And for over 130 years, it was deliberately erased — buried by the Lost Cause movement, suppressed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and replaced in the official American narrative by a general's order issued three years later.

This is Episode 1 of Risky History — the podcast that goes where the history books didn't. Every episode we dig into the American stories that carry the most risk: stories involving race, power, politics, and the people who were written out of the record so others could write themselves in.

History has always been about who controls the story. We're taking it back.

Sources: David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) | History.com | Time Magazine | Zinn Education Project

Music: "Strange World" by AlexBeroza — CC BY license. Source: ccmixter.org