Originally called Decoration Day, Congress established Memorial Day as the last Monday in May in 1968. The undertold history of Memorial Day dates back to the Civil War.
First observed in Charleston, South Carolina on May 1, 1865, thousands of African Americans, including the formerly enslaved, 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, and 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, were led by children as they gathered to honor 257 Union soldiers who were buried in a mass grave on Washington Race Course which was used as a Confederate prison camp. The ancestors exhumed the mass grave, reburied the bodies and decorated their graves; hence, Decoration Day.
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