ARMY TEST AND EVALUATION COMMAND OBSERVES BLACK HISTORY MONTH WITH TRIBUTE TO SERVICE OF BLACK SOLDIERS

Mel Reid reenacts the role of a Soldier with the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, Company B, during the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command's Black History Month celebration Feb. 15 in the Aberdeen Proving Ground Recreation Center.

By Mike Cast
DTC Public Affairs

The Army Test and Evaluation Command sponsored a tribute to African Americans who served in the U.S. military during the Civil War era as it observed Black History Month Feb. 15 at the Aberdeen Proving Ground Recreation Center. The keynote speakers at the event were re-enactors who brought the era to life with tales of African-Americans’ struggles for equality, their heroism and service to the nation.

Mel Reid, in the role of a Soldier who served in the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War, described how slave traders captured his mother in Sierra Leone, West Africa, an important center of the slave trade at the time. They shipped her across the Atlantic to North Carolina, where she was sold to a plantation owner named Reid. He spoke of growing to manhood on a plantation, working long hours in the hot sun, and of several attempts to escape slavery, which earned him a severe whipping before he finally successfully got away and made a perilous journey to Ohio.

“At night I followed the stars, and I ended up in this place called Maysville, Kentucky, right along this remarkable body of water called the Ohio River,” Reid said of his character. “I happened upon another slave that I had met a few days before who had escaped from another plantation. He said to me, ‘Meet me later on tonight because there is a man who has a boat, and he will put us on his boat and take us across the river to Ohio, to freedom. So I met him that night. Yes, indeed, there was a man with a boat, and we got in his boat, and we got almost to the other side of the river. I was so excited I jumped out of the boat and swam the rest of the way. And I stood up on the soil of Ripley, Ohio, and I looked up to the heavens and said, ‘Thank you, divine Creator, for freedom.’ It felt so good.”

The escaped slave eventually made his way to Oberlin, Ohio, where he met his wife to be, settled down to family life and enjoyed the blessings of a free man. When the Civil War came in 1861, the former slave decided he had a stake in the fight and enlisted to do his part to win freedom for the black people who were still oppressed.

Reid’s narrative continued: “I thought, ‘People like me have a lot to gain if we fight in this war, and we have a lot to lose if the guys in gray win, so we’ve got to get in it. I wrote a letter to the president. I wrote a letter to the governor of Ohio. He wrote back, saying ‘You’re not getting in this. This is a white man’s war.’ I’ve been through slavery, and been free, and I’ve got family in bondage in North Carolina. They need to feel what I feel.”

Reid described how his character met the great Frederick Douglass in Boston and how he came to serve in the 54th Volunteer Infantry under the leadership of its youthful commander, Col. Robert Gould Shaw. He told how the black Soldiers in his unit made the assault on the Confederate battery at Fort Wagner, near Charleston, South Carolina, on July 18, 1863. Fully a quarter of the men in the 54th, including Col. Shaw, died in the action.

The Soldiers of the regiment later made a name for themselves in the Battle of Olustee, which took place in February 1864 near Lake City, Florida. It was the only major battle in Florida during the war. Union casualties were 1,861 men killed, wounded or missing, while Confederate casualties were 946 killed, wounded or missing.

“Eventually the war ended. It took an incredible toll. Six million Americans were involved in the Civil War,” Reid said. “Six hundred and twenty-four thousand of them didn’t come home. Forty thousand of those were black Soldiers. At the end of the war, there were more black Soldiers in the Union Army than there were white Soldiers in the Confederate Army. Some 240,000 black men fought in the Army and the Navy during the Civil War.”

William McCurtis, who is the regimental sergeant major of the 9th Memorial Cavalry, a group that reenacts the history of the 9th Cavalry, talks about the history of the Buffalo Soldiers during the Army Test and Evaluation Command's Black History Month event Feb. 15 at APG's Recreation Center.

Reid said Americans should reflect on the sacrifices African Americans have made in uniform, not only during the Civil War but throughout the history of the United States. To honor those who gave their lives in the Civil War, people of varying races should pause to think of them and put aside their differences, he said.

“I know in these times some of us and our youngsters like to idolize musicians, sports figures, actors and actresses, which is a good thing, but I would simply offer that you think about those 240,000 men who fought for our freedom,” he said. “I have to wonder, should we tell our children, given all of that, and the things that they went through, isn’t it about time to put down the guns?”

William McCurtis, founder of the Headquarters Troop, 9th Memorial Cavalry, in Phoenix, Arizona, recalled the military history of the Buffalo Soldiers, black men who served in Southwest during the Indian Wars. He focused on the history of the 9th Cavalry Regiment, a unit that was constituted on July 28, 1866, and organized on Sept. 21, 1866, in New Orleans. The men enlisted for five years and received $13 per month, plus room, board and clothing. The regiment's motto was, and remains, “We Can, We Will.” Col. Edward Hatch became the unit’s commanding officer.

“This man was brilliant with tactics. He was one of the most able cavalry commanders during the Civil War,” McCurtis said. “All you needed to do was tell him what needed to be done, and he got it done – and he took care of his men. The one drawback is he was prejudiced. He was extremely prejudiced. He saw one color and one color only: Army blue.”

To protect the Southwest from the depredations of tribes such as the Comanche and Lipan Apache, the 9th Cavalry was sent to a temporary assignment at San Antonio and Fort Stockton, Texas, and then to San Pedro Springs, Texas, where their exploits in the Indian Wars added a colorful chapter to the annals of American military history. The earned the moniker Buffalo Soldiers from the Native Americans not because their hair seemed like buffalo fur but because they fought with the ferocity and tenacity of the American bison, McCurtis added.

“ For the next 26 years, the men of the 9th Cavalry rode and fought and bled and died in West Texas, in New Mexico, in Colorado, Arizona, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Wyoming,” McCurtis said. “The 9th stayed on the frontier the longest. They never wanted to be recognized as African Americans, or Negro Soldiers, or colored troops. They wanted one thing. Recognize us as American fighting men. That’s it.”

The white people on the American frontier were not enthused at having black troops sent out to protect them, and prejudice was rife, McCurtis said. But the Buffalo Soldiers ultimately changed their opinions of black people.

“It was a thankless job. We were going to be killed on all sides,” McCurtis said of the troops he represented in character. “But we took an oath to protect and defend our citizens. Maybe the rest of the world didn’t consider us American Soldiers, but we considered ourselves that. And we were bound and determined to make sure you knew we were the best, and that you could depend on us.”

He described how the Soldiers of the 9th Cavalry came up against the great Comanche chief Quanah Parker and defeated his warriors in battle. Apache chiefs such as Geronimo and Victorio also learned firsthand of the tenacity of Buffalo Soldiers, McCurtis said.

In the Spanish-American War, which broke out in 1898, black Soldiers who had served on the American frontier distinguished themselves again in battle, he added.

“At San Juan Hill, we’re the first ones in that blockhouse,” McCurtis said. “That charge up San Juan Hill wasn’t a charge, it was one heck of a walk. There is no way you can ride a horse up a 4-percent grade hill with trench lines and barbed wire. We lay at the bottom of San Juan Hill half the day in the heat, in the dirt, in the humidity. Finally, a couple of guys with the 10th decided, ‘If we are going to die, we’re going to die, but we’re not lying here anymore. We’re going up that hill.’ All of a sudden, everybody else with the 10th is walking. Bullets are flying like you wouldn’t believe. Men are dropping right and left. All of a sudden there is a cry from the right, from one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, who says, ‘Hey boys, look, the 10th is going up. Let’s go with them.’”

McCurtis said he was also moved by the patriotism of African-American Soldiers in America’s most recent battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and urged listeners to learn more about their history.

“It’s the greatest history on the planet,” he said. “There is no army like the United States Army. There never was and never will be.”

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