by KYW's Dr. Marciene Mattleman

The origins of Memorial Day are not clear. Originally called Decoration Day, more than twenty towns take claim as its birthplace.

According to Professor David Blight of Yale University’s history department, the first day commemorating our soldiers was observed in 1865 by librated slaves in Charleston. A parade of thousands of freed blacks and Union soldiers was followed by patriotic singing.

Later it was adopted by other sites and called Decoration Day. At Waterloo, New York the name became officially Memorial Day.  Congress recognized the day as a national holiday just more than 100 years later in 1968.

Other countries commemorate those who died in their wars at different times and with different names. France and Belgium honor their war dead as Remembrance Day and Ireland with a National Day of Commemoration.

Universal to all nations is poetry –Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, written in 1870, that decries the horror of war with the words, “Cannon to the left of them, cannon to the right of them, into the jaws of death, rode the six hundred.”