Memorial Day

Memorial Day will be celebrated next Monday, May 31. In Rockdale the VFW and the American Legion will be putting up a flag display at Bridge Park to honor all the soldiers who’ve lost their lives fighting for our country.

The History Channel provided some interesting information on this holiday. Memorial Day had been called Decoration Day until after World War II. It was also held on May 30 no matter what day of the week it fell on, but that changed in 1971 when it was moved to the last Monday in May so it would make the holiday a three-day weekend.

Decoration Day was started after the American Civil War and it only celebrated the lives of soldiers lost in that war. After World War I, it was changed to celebrate lives lost in any war.

One of the earliest commemorations was held by recently freed African-Americans. As the Civil War neared its end, thousands of Union soldiers, held as prisoners of war, were herded into a series of hastily assembled camps in Charleston, SC. Conditions at one camp, a former racetrack near the city’s Citadel, were so bad that more than 250 prisoners died from disease or exposure, and were buried in a mass grave behind the track’s grandstand.

Three weeks after the Confederate surrender, an unusual procession entered the former camp: On May 1, 1865, more than 1,000 people recently freed from enslavement, accompanied by regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops, including the Massachusetts 54th Infantry, and a handful of white Charlestonians, gathered in the camp to consecrate a new, proper burial site for the Union dead. The group sang hymns, gave readings and distributed flowers around the cemetery, which they dedicated to the “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

There are more than 20 towns who claim to be the originator of the holiday, but there is only one official one, the tiny town of Waterloo, NY. The city had been shutting its businesses and taking to the streets for the first of many continuous, community-wide celebrations for over 100 years. President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation, recently passed by the U.S. Congress, declaring the tiny upstate village the “official” birthplace of Memorial Day.

Wearing a red poppy on Memorial Day began with a World War I poem. In the spring of 1915, bright red flowers began poking through the battle-ravaged land across northern France and Flanders in northern Belgium. Canadian Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, who served as a brigade surgeon for an Allied artillery unit, spotted a cluster of the poppies shortly after serving as a brigade surgeon during the bloody Second Battle of Ypres. The sight of the bright red flowers against the dreary backdrop of war inspired McCrae to pen the poem, “In Flanders Field,” in which he gives voice to the soldiers who had been killed in battle and lay buried beneath the poppy-covered grounds. Later that year, a Georgia teacher and volunteer war worker named Moina Michael read the poem in Ladies’ Home Journal and wrote her own poem, “We Shall Keep the Faith” to begin a campaign to make the poppy a symbol of tribute to all who died in war. The poppy remains a symbol of remembrance to this day.

Honor Memorial Day because someone gave the ultimate sacrifice so you could enjoy your freedom.—K.W.C.