Ralph Gohn News Today

THE ISSUE In 1868, three years after the Civil War ended, the leader of an organization of Union veterans established Decoration Day — as Memorial Day originally was known — as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. According to Utah’s Deseret News, one of the very first Memorial Day celebrations may have been even earlier, on May 1, 1865, when Black workmen gathered at a Charleston, South Carolina, racecourse and club that the Confederates had...

One day a few summers past, the heat rising in waves from the streets of Marietta convinced me to delay my walk late into the night. My route took me