Joseph Orton Kerbey, a Union veteran, wrote in an 1890 book of meeting beforehand at town hall with Capt. Dan Lee, a nephew of Robert E. Lee who led the Mathew Fontaine Maury Camp of Confederate veterans, and Maj. Andrew Birdsall, superintendent of the National Cemetery.

Lee offered the camp's help in decorating the Federal soldiers' graves.

Lee said "their services were tendered gladly to this end; though they preferred not to be associated with the mob of colored people, who had been in the habit of making a picnic out of the day," Kerbey wrote.

Kerbey thanked his former foes, but said he had no authority to act for the Grand Army of the Republic. (He was a member of the GAR's Kit Carson Post in Washington, D.C.)

Birdsall accepted the offer, Kerbey recorded.

Pfanz said 1890 was the last National Cemetery event in which the black community participated. African-Americans held a separate procession and ceremony, decorating soldiers' graves.

That gradual pattern was repeated in communities across the South, Yale University historian David Blight writes in his book "Race and Reunion." Blacks initially took leading roles in Memorial Day ceremonies, honoring the Union dead and expressing their newfound liberties as citizens.

But reconciliation between North and South came at a price--the end of black participation in such high-profile events, Blight and Pfanz said.

The institution of postwar Black Codes and the long Jim Crow era that followed further proscribed African-Americans' rights and their role in public life.

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Clint Schemmer: 540/368-5029
Email: cschemmer@freelancestar.com