The origin of Memorial Day trace back to 1865 when freed slaves started a tradition to honor fallen Union soldiers and to celebrate emancipation and commemorate those who died for that cause.
A THREAD
In 1865, black people in Charleston, South Carolina, held a series of memorials & rituals to honor unnamed fallen Union soldiers and celebrate the struggle against slavery. One of the largest memorial took place on May 1st 1865.
As the civil war ended, confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course & Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrid conditions and at least 257 died of disease and were quickly buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.
After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston, black workmen went to the mass grave site, reburied the Union dead properly & built a high fence around the cemetery.
They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
The freed black people, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.”
Several hundreds of black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths & crosses. Then came black men marching in, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen.
Within the cemetery black children’s choir sang before a series of black ministers read from the Bible.
After the dedication, the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and watched soldiers drill.
Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite.
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66 years ago today, Mack Parker was murdered by a white mob. It’s considered one of the last civil rights era lynchings.
THREAD
Mack Charles Parker was a 23-year-old truck driver who had returned to his hometown of Lumberton, Mississippi, after receiving a general discharge following two years in the Army.
On the morning of February 24, 1959, Parker was awakened by Marshal Ham Slade and several deputies, who alleged that he had raped a young white woman, June Walters, the night before.
More than 8000 black women in Mississippi and S. Carolina were given involuntary hysterectomies (removal of uterus) between 1920s and 80s when they went to see white doctors for other complaints.
These came to be known as ‘MISSISSIPPI APPENDECTOMIES’
—A THREAD—
In 1961, Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black sharecropper and civil rights activist, entered a Mississippi hospital to remove a benign uterine fibroid tumor. She returned to her family’s shack on the Marlow plantation to recover, unaware of the life-altering procedure she endured.
While Hamer recovered, unsettling rumors spread in the plantation’s big house. Vera Marlow, the owner’s wife & cousin of the surgeon who treated Hamer, gossiped to the cook that the surgeon had removed Hamer’s uterus during the procedure, rendering her sterile without consent.
In 1780, Paul Cuffee, his brother & 5 other Black men petitioned the Massachusetts legislature demanding the right to vote.
He won free black men the right to vote in Massachusetts on the basis of "No Taxation Without Representation."
THREAD
Paul Cuffee was born Paul Slocum on Jan. 17, 1759, Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, to Kofi Slocum, a farmer & freed slave, and Ruth Moses, a native American of the Wampanog nation.
In 1766 he & his brother John inherited a 116 acre farm from their father in Buzzard's Bay, Massachusetts, near Dartmouth. He changed his surname to Kofi, spelled "Cuffee." The name Kofi suggests that his father came from the Ashanti or Ewe people of Ghana.
In 19th century Europe, C-sections were performed only in direst need and maternal mortality was very high. At the same time in Africa, indigenous people were performing the operation successfully saving both while Europeans mainly concentrated on saving the baby.
A THREAD
Caesarean section was considered a life-threatening procedure in England that was only to be undertaken in the direst of circumstances and facing the decision on whether to save the life of the mother or baby.
The first successful C-section done in Africa ("success" defined as both surviving) is usually credited to Irish surgeon James Barry (Margaret Ann Bulkley), who performed the operation in Cape Town, South Africa.
113 years ago today, Joseph Phillipe Lemercier Laroche died when the RMS Titanic sank. Laroche and his children were the only black passengers.
A THREAD
Joseph Phillipe Lemercier Laroche was the son of a white French army captain and a Haitian woman who was a descendant of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first ruler of independent Haiti.
Laroche’s uncle, Dessalines M. Cincinnatus, was president of Haiti from 1911 to 1912.