What we now celebrate as Memorial Day officially began on May 30, 1868 as Decoration Day, a day of remembrance which helped Americans to grieve the soldiers who had lost their lives in the line of duty during the four-year war. The first formal observance followed years of informal commemorations; some records indicate that the first precursor to Decoration Day was organized by a coalition of formerly enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina as early as 1865, within a month of the Confederacy's surrender.
In the years after World War II, people gradually began referring to the observance as 'Memorial Day', with the federal government adopting the name in 1967.
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