Archive for February, 2012

John E. Green

Posted February 27, 2012 at by BShellum.

Category: Article

John E. Green was one of only three black Regular Army line officers to serve in the U.S. Army in the period before World War I. There were several black chaplains, like Allen Allensworth and George Prioleau, but only three serving in the infantry and cavalry arms. Unfortunately, John Green is less well known than the other two officers, Charles Young and Benjamin O. Davis, Sr.
John Green, like Benjamin Davis, began his service as an enlisted soldier in 1898 and earned his officers commission in 1901. Born in Tennessee on April 27, 1878, Green was recruited by Chaplain Allen Allensworth and joined the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Regiment on his twenty-first birthday. Green had been attending college at Walden University in Nashville, Tennessee when recruited by Allensworth and joined with a view to compete for an officer’s commission as soon as he was eligible. He served as a private and corporal in Company H, Twenty-Fourth Infantry, from April 27, 1899 to July 7, 1901. Green was commissioned on February 2, 1901, and accepted a second lieutenant commission in the Twenty-Fifth Infantry on July 8, 1901 while serving with his unit in the Philippine Islands. He served as a commissioned officer with the Twenty-Fifth his entire career as a Regular Army officer.

Charles Young

Posted February 22, 2012 at by BShellum.

Category: Article

Charles Young is an unheralded military hero, whose rich life story, from 1864 to 1922, is virtually unknown to most Americans, African Americans included. Consider his extraordinary honors:
third black graduate of West Point, first African American superintendent of one of our national parks, first black U.S. military attaché, first African American officer to command a Regular Army regiment, and highest-ranking black officer in the Regular Army until his death in 1922. Unlike the first two black academy graduates before him, Young went on to a long and distinguished military career and achieved the rank of colonel.

For nearly thirty years he was the standard-bearer for his race in the officer corps. Only serious medical problems discovered on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War I and racial prejudice prevented him from becoming the first African American general.

During his remarkable army career, a period firmly rooted in Jim Crow, Young lived socially isolated within an officer corps uncomfortable with an African American in its ranks. In spite of this, Charles Young used his natural gifts to persevere, succeed, and prosper. He also passed the torch to another generation of African American officers like Benjamin O. Davis Jr. who achieved the rank and recognition that the U.S. Army refused Young.

Charles Young deserves rescue from his historical obscurity and a restoration of the prestige and recognition he enjoyed at the time of his death in 1922. Not only has he earned his rewards, but because of them, he merits a place in America’s pantheon of acknowledged military leaders.

Fort Monroe

Posted February 15, 2012 at by aspears.

Category: Article

In 1619, a group of Dutch sailors stopped at an English settlement on the Old Point Comfort Peninsula near present day Hampton Roads. They were hungry and so traded a number of African men and women in their possession for food. That transaction was the first record of African slaves in what would become the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The English were on the peninsula because they recognized it as an ideal location for defensive fortifications to protect their interests in the Chesapeake Bay. After the British burned Washington in 1814 Congress gained an immediate if tardy appreciation for the Old Point Comfort Peninsula’s defensive qualities and commissioned the construction of Fort Monroe. The star fort was designed by one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s staff officers and the construction, which began in 1817, was overseen for a time by a young lieutenant in the United States Army named Robert E. Lee. When the American Civil War began in 1861, the Union garrison at Fort Monroe was too large for opposing Confederate forces to subdue so the Southern troops settled into the surrounding countryside to observe.

The local black population was watching too. On the night of May 22, 1861, three enslaved men, Shepard Mallory, Frank Baker, and James Townsend, made their escape to Fort Monroe. Shortly thereafter their owner, who also happened to be an officer in the Confederate Army, arrived at Fort Monroe under a flag of truce. He had come to take back his property.

Union General Ben Butler had interviewed Mallory, Baker, and Townsend. He knew the men had been working as laborers and thereby aiding the Confederate war effort. When Colonel Mallory demanded the return of his slaves under statutes laid out in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 General Butler responded that he was obligated to abide by and enforce the laws of the United States. He was also quick to point out that since Virginia had seceded from the Union those laws no longer applied.

Butler informed Mallory that he would keep the men, label them “contraband of war,” and put them to work for wages and food on behalf of the United States government. When enslaved blacks in the region learned that “Freedom’s Fortress” was open for business 10,000 more men and women followed in the footsteps of the original three pathfinders and their way from slavery to freedom at Fort Monroe. On November 1, 2011, President Barrack Obama designated Fort Monroe a national monument making it the 396th unit in our National Park System. The National Park Service has staff on the ground and hope to begin providing programs for the public perhaps by as early as the summer of 2012.

To learn more about Fort Monroe please visit www.nps.gov/fomr

Alan Spears

Our Parks Our Pride, Our History

Posted February 6, 2012 at by admin.

Category: Article

Ladies and Gentlemen,

this video is curtsey of Amy Marquis Associate Editor, National Parks Magazine by way of Alan Spears.

It is quite moving.

below is the link or just watch it here.

The Way Home: Returning to the National Parks

Buffalo Soldier Bill Clears the House

Posted February 4, 2012 at by aspears.

Category: Article

On January 25, 2012, H.R. 1022, Representative Jackie Speier’s Buffalo Soldier Study Act passed the House. Action on the bill now moves across Capitol Hill where Senator Dianne Feinstein’s companion legislation S. 544, which has already had a hearing, awaits markup and (hopefully) passage. The recent success in the House of Representatives signifies that we are one step closer to authorizing the Secretary of Interior to determine the best way the National Park Service will commemorate the role played by America’s black regular troops (a.k.a. the Buffalo Soldiers) in protecting our national parks in the years before that agency was established.

Enhancing the Buffalo Soldier legacy in the NPS inventory is an important and appropriate step. By virtue of the sites the agency manages and the stories it interprets and preserves the National Park Service is one of the largest stewards of African American history in the United States. From Civil War to Civil Rights and from the gallantry of the Tuskegee Airmen to the entrepreneurial prowess of Maggie Lena Walker, the National Park System continues to enhance public understanding of the African American experience. Buffalo Soldiers contributed mightily to our history by serving alongside their white counterparts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the first park rangers. They improved park infrastructure, protected park resources, and, in the case of one company from the 9th cavalry, spent the summer of 1903 road building in Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Park (CA) under the command of Lieutenant Charles Young, the third African American to graduate from West Point in the 19th century.

All those who care about the preservation of black history owe Congresswoman Jackie Speier a debt of gratitude for her work on behalf of the Buffalo Soldier legacy and we should all look forward to supporting Senator Feinstein in her efforts to successfully move S. 544 through Congress.

Alan Spears

Guest Bloggers For Black History Month and beyond

Posted February 2, 2012 at by David Ofwono, President.

Category: Article

Ladies and Gentlemen,
in an effort to help spread the history of the Buffalo Soldiers, (that history that is seldom if ever taught in our Schools) we have invited noted historians, authors and supporters to provide us with articles on this site.
Currently we have Mr. Anthony Powell, Mr. Brian Shellum, Mr.Guy Washington, Mr. Alan Spears and Mr. Fredrick Penn contributing.

we hope that you will find their articles as informative as we do.

Alan Spears Bio

Brian Shellum Bio