Memorial Day is marked this year on May 26, falling on the last Monday of May, and it is meant to be a day for reflection on U.S. service members who died while serving, according to the Congressional Research Service, which also describes the holiday’s role in the National Moment of Remembrance. The observance encourages Americans to pause at 3 p.m. for a moment of silence, as the holiday’s focus on mourning and remembrance remains part of how many families mark the day.
For Iraq War veteran Edmundo Eugenio Martinez Jr., the holiday’s intent is personal and specific. Martinez, 48, an Army veteran who lives in Katy, Texas, west of Houston, said Memorial Day has lost so much meaning that many Americans “conflate and mix up Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Armed Forces Day, July Fourth.” In his view, the meaning of Memorial Day is tied to those who died rather than to broader celebrations of service.
Martinez said his own connection to the day centers on honoring service members he knew who lost their lives. “I was either there when they died or they were soldiers of mine, buddies of mine,” he said, adding, “Some of them lost the battle after the war.” He has also described how he uses social media to share photos and stories about the service members he knew who died.
Beyond personal accounts, the article traces how the holiday’s history helped shape its modern identity. Its origins can be traced to the American Civil War, which killed more than 600,000 service members between 1861 and 1865, and to early observances that became known as Decoration Day. The first national observance of Decoration Day is described as taking place on May 30, 1868, after an organization of Union veterans called for decorating war graves with flowers that were in bloom.
The practice was also widespread before any single “birthplace” was claimed. The reporting notes that Waterloo, New York, began a formal observance on May 5, 1866, and was later proclaimed as the holiday’s birthplace, while Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, traced its first observance to October 1864, according to the Library of Congress. The historical record also includes accounts of women in some Confederate states decorating graves before the war’s end.
The reporting describes a debate among historians about which early commemoration counts as first. David Blight, a Yale history professor, pointed to May 1, 1865, when as many as 10,000 people—many of them Black—held a parade, heard speeches and dedicated the graves of Union dead in Charleston, South Carolina. Blight’s account also ties to how 267 Union troops who had died at a Confederate prison were buried in a mass grave, with Black churches later burying them in individual graves after the war.
The article also describes how Memorial Day has long faced tension between solemn remembrance and public spectacle. As early as 1869, The New York Times wrote that the holiday could become “sacrilegious” and no longer “sacred” if it focused more on pomp, dinners and oratory. In 1871, abolitionist Frederick Douglass delivered a Decoration Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery in which he said he feared Americans were forgetting the Civil War’s impetus, which he tied to enslavement.
That concern was echoed in later commentary about how the holiday was remembered across different communities. Ben Railton, a professor of English and American studies at Fitchburg State University, told the AP that although roughly 180,000 Black men served in the Union Army, Memorial Day in many communities would effectively become “white Memorial Day,” especially after the rise of the Jim Crow South. Other historians described how disputes and misunderstandings about the holiday’s meaning can show up through time, including through stories about the ways people spend the day.
Over time, the holiday’s calendar and public life also changed. The reporting says Matthew Dennis, an emeritus history professor at the University of Oregon, traced one shift to the addition of Armistice Day after World War I ended on Nov. 11, 1918, which later became national and then was renamed Veterans Day in 1954. Congress then changed Memorial Day from every May 30 to the last Monday in May in 1971, and Dennis said the creation of a three-day weekend reflected that Memorial Day had already been transformed into a more generic remembrance of the dead as well as a day of leisure.
That change in the calendar helped deepen Memorial Day’s association with travel and commerce. Even in the 19th century, Dennis said, grave ceremonies were followed by leisure activities such as picnicking and foot races. He also said the holiday evolved alongside baseball and the automobile, and with the five-day work week and summer vacation, while a 2002 book titled “A History of Memorial Day: Unity, Discord and the Pursuit of Happiness” is cited in the reporting as discussing those links.
The reporting describes how businesses became more likely to open as the holiday became more flexible with the Monday schedule. Once Memorial Day moved to Monday, “the traditional barriers against doing business began to crumble,” according to authors Richard Harmond and Thomas Curran. These days, the article says, Memorial Day sales and travel are woven into the nation’s muscle memory, even as some veterans and families push for a clearer emphasis on remembrance.
Martinez, meanwhile, said he is trying to encourage people to still mark the day with time for silence and reflection. He said, “I’m not trying to be a Debbie Downer and tell you not to have your hotdogs and your burgers. But give them at least a couple minutes,” and urged listeners to “Give them some silence. Say a little prayer. Give them a nod. There’s a bunch of families out there that don’t have loved ones.”