As it is truly said, “history is written by the victors.” And that is why for many moons it was common wisdom that Memorial Day was the work of Confederates, two Mississippi war widows who in May of 1866 decided to place flowers upon the graves of fallen soldiers, American and secessionist alike.

But no. Wrong. Lie. Never happened. Just another Confederate myth. Plaguing all of our lives.

For once the Civil War was over, and then the northern white people betrayed the recently freed slaves by abandoning Reconstruction, the story of that conflict and its aftermath became the domain of Southern historians. Who ceaselessly churned out canards worthy of Beelzebub the Father of Lies himself. Or even the Kleagle.

And thus in the schools I was taught such as Robert E. Lee was a veritable godman, when in truth he may have been the stupidest general who ever lived. If Lee had hunkered down and fought a defensive war the South would to this day be peopled with black folk led around by choke-chains. But no. He decided to go out and wander the lands, on an offensive campaign he couldn’t possibly hope to win, even if he could get in a time machine and bring back Merlyn the wizard to assist him. So once Ulysses S. Grant succeeded in driving the Confederates out of the west, he moved to the east, where he proceeded to beat Lee like a gong. The Southern historians Lied that Grant was just some old drunk who won only because he was a butcher unparalleled since Genghis Khan, and meanwhile his presidency was more corrupt than Caligula. All lies.

Like those Confederate war widows with the flowers are Lies. For the first Memorial Day was in truth produced by black people. On May 1, 1865. In Charleston, South Carolina.

In that town was a slaveholders’ racetrack where 257 Union soldiers had been imprisoned, suffered, and died, their bodies then dumped into unmarked graves. With the war at last over the now-freed black people of the city decided these dead deserved something better. So they re-laid the bodies in neat rows and erected a ten-foot-tall white fence around them, with an archway o’erhead reading Martyrs Of The Race Course.

After this was accomplished more than 10,000 people, mostly black folk, gathered May 1 to honor these dead. Three thousand black schoolchildren paraded along the racetrack, bearing roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” Black pastors delivered sermons and led attendees in prayer; spirituals were sung; there were picnics. In the afternoon black and white Union regiments marched around the graves and staged a drill. The New York Tribune described the tribute as “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.” The gravesites looked like “one mass of flowers” and “the breeze wafted the sweet perfumes from them” as “tears of joy” were shed.

That’s, your Memorial Day.

Working off that ceremony, in May 1868 General John Logan issued General Order No. 11, designating May 30 for “the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.”

Some years later, after Reconstruction was deliberately dismantled, and filthy racists again ascended to control of the South, those Charleston graves were covered over by Hampton Park—named for Wade Hampton III, a howling racist who before the war had owned more human beings than most anybody in the South, and after the war shoveled unending midas piles to the Ku Klux Klan.

During the war, once Sherman came up against him, Hampton was daily slapped silly. For instance, as Sherman neared Columbia, South Carolina, and Hampton fled at top speed, the Hampton dumbbell burned down the town, he was such a fumblebum. As Sherman wrote: “Without hesitation I charge General Wade Hampton with having burned his own city of Columbia, not with a malicious intent, or as the manifestation of a silly ‘Roman stoicism,’ but from folly and want of sense, in filling it with lint, cotton, and tinder.” And: “In my official report of this conflagration, I distinctly charged it to General Wade Hampton, and confess I did so pointedly, to shake the faith of his people in him, for he was in my opinion boastful, and professed to be the special champion of South Carolina.”

This numbnuts of a Hampton, readers might recall, was portrayed as divine revered hero throughout the screamingly racist novel Gone With The Wind; one of the several neglected Scarlett children, even named for the fellow.

In truth, the unreconstructed white people of the South—of which today there remain tens of millions—have never liked Memorial Day. They consider it Yankee. They prefer their own, special, different, racist, Confederate Memorial Day—a day in which the celebrants wallow in remembrance of the righteousness of the Cause.

In his depressing tome Confederates In The Attic journalist Tony Horwitz finds himself in Vicksburg, Mississippi on a Memorial Day in the mid-1990s. In that town Horwitz found there were two American Legion posts: one white, one black. The white Legionnaires refused to involve themselves in Memorial Day. “You do Memorial Day,” they informed the black post, “and we’ll do Veteran’s Day.” Every year the black post would invite the white Legionnaires to attend a Memorial Day wreath-laying ceremony; every year the white Legionnaires refused to attend. The black post had to pay for black marching bands to come in from out of state; there were always “reasons” why the local school band could not participate.

“They said, ‘School got out a few days ago and the uniforms have been washed and put away,’” Horwitz was told. “Well, we can wash them again. The cleaners aren’t leaving town. But that’s their excuse. There’s a Miss Mississippi pageant in July. I bet you the school band comes out for that.”

May 28, 1996 saw a massive community turnout in Vicksburg for the passing of the Olympics Torch, on its way to the games in Atlanta. Bands from all the local schools and military installations participated. But for the Vicksburg Memorial Day ceremony two days later, those bands were unavailable. Just as the local Army Engineers for two years refused to fire the traditional twenty-one-gun salute at the Memorial Day ceremony. Claiming it could not afford the ammunition

White folk in Vicksburg remain so wedded to the Lost Cause that to this day many don’t even acknowledge the Fourth of July. Shelby Foote recalls that in the 1930s “there was a family from Ohio in town, God knows why, and on July Fourth they drove their car up on the levee and spread a blanket and had a picnic. They didn’t set the brakes on the car and it ran down into the Mississippi River and everyone said, ‘It served them right for celebrating the Fourth of July.’”

So renowned was Vicksburg’s resistance to celebrating July 4 that Dwight Eisenhower was dispatched to the community in 1947, charged with convincing the town’s white citizens to rejoin the Union. His visit had little effect. At the end of the 20th Century there were still no July 4th fireworks in Vicksburg. To the white Vicksburger July 4 remains a day of mourning: the anniversary of the 1863 day the city capitulated to Grant and the Union. The culmination of what military historians unSoutherned regard as one of the most effective and bloodless siege campaigns in all history.

Right. Shelby Foote. When Ken Burns pummeled the land with his PBS series The Civil War he unaccountably centered it around Foote, presenting the man as some sort of sage and oracle, neglecting to inform viewers Foote was in fact an unreconstructed Confederate racist. For Foote admired as “a fine man” the slave trader and terrorist Nathan Bedford Forrest, described the Ku Klux Klan as “very akin” to the French Resistance, considered emancipation “a sin,” and damned modern blacks for behaving “somewhere between ape and man.”

For Horwitz, Foote recited a ditty much beloved from his youth:

Abraham Lincoln was a son of a bitch,
his ass ran over with a seven-year itch
his fist beat his dick like a blacksmith’s hammer
while his asshole whistled the Star-Spangled Banner

This guy, a “historian.” History, as it is truly said, written by the victors. So who won the Civil War? Why the South, of course. We know this from the Kleagle. A nation in which the Union truly prevailed would never have elevated that brutish five-alarm racist to the presidency. Twice. All these confederates running around yammering “the south will rise again” needn’t bother. The thing remains fully risen. The South won. And continues to reign. Uber alles.