It was In Charleston, South Carolina, and the city’s Black residents had already reburied the Union soldiers who had died in a POW camp there. There, on May 1, 1865, three weeks after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, a parade of 10,000, led by 3,000 Black schoolchildren singing a Union marching song, commemorated the soldiers who had given their lives as “martyrs” for the cause of human freedom.
