Following evidence was gathered to support the argument that accounts of the 1865 Charleston commemoration were deliberately kept from public knowledge. 1. “This was a story that had really been suppressed both in the local memory and certainly the national memory,” says Blight. 2. Once the war was over and Charleston was rebuilt in the 1880s, the city’s white residents likely had little interest in remembering an event held by people who had been formerly enslaved to celebrate the Union dead. 3. “That didn’t fit their version of what the war was all about,” says Blight. What additional piece of evidence s to create the MOST COMPLETE argument that accounts of the 1865 Charleston commemoration were deliberately kept from public knowledge?
A. But it wasn’t until a remarkable discovery in a dusty Harvard University archive in the late 1990s that historians learned about a Memorial Day commemoration organized by a group of emancipated Black people less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865. B. According to two reports that Blight found in The New York Tribune and The Charleston Courier, a crowd of 10,000 people, mostly emancipated people with some white missionaries, staged a parade around the racetrack. C. “That’s such a telling statement,” says Blight. “The woman who wrote that letter may not have known about it, but the fact that she didn’t tells the story.” D. “I grew up in Charleston, and my granddaddy used to tell us this story of a parade at the old racetrack, and we never knew whether to believe him or not.”