Celebrations

The first known observance of a Memorial Day-type observance was in Charleston, South Carolina in 1865; freedmen (freed enslaved Africans) commemorated and celebrated at the Washington Race Course, today the location of Hampton Park, and each year thereafter. African Americans founded what was then called “Decoration Day,” now referred to as Memorial Day, at the graveyard of 257 Union soldiers and labeled the gravesite “Martyrs of the Race Course”, on May 1, 1865.