Add Memorial Day to the list of things black people invented, but rarely get credit for.

A debate over the origins of Memorial Day has raged for decades, but many historians trace the first celebration of the holiday to a group of freed slaves in South Carolina, according to The Philadelphia Tribune.

On May 1, 1865, three weeks after the end of the Civil War, the newly emancipated men and women gathered in Charleston to commemorate the end of the Civil War and to honor Union soldiers who perished during the fighting.

During the war, the Confederacy turned a local race track into a prison and held captured Union soldiers in the facility. Due to the harsh conditions of the prison, many men perished there. Their bodies were thrown in an unmarked mass grave at the facility. Following the war, the local black community tried to right that wrong.

“Between the end of the war and May 1, several African American churches and others re-interred those bodies in a small picket-fenced cemetery named the Graveyard of the Martyrs. Later, these soldiers were buried in national cemeteries at Beaufort or Florence or buried in their home communities,” reports The Charleston City Paper.

“A procession stepped off led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing,” said Yale University historian David Blight during an interview about the first Memorial Day with the Black Radio Network. “The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses.”

Three years after these efforts, Mexican-American War and Civil War veteran General John Logan issued a special order formally recognizing “Decoration Day” as a holiday “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, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land.”

Sadly, Logan’s proclamation is often acknowledged as the origin of Memorial Day, while the contribution of the freed black people is ignored. So, when you bite into your ribs and hot dogs, thinking of the 761st, the 6888th and all the other soldiers who have fought and died for modern America, don't forget to also thank the ancestors for their contributions and your day off.