AMERICA’S FORGOT TEN FRONTIER FORCE
History once erased the role of Black servicemen in the westward and overseas expansion of the United States, but in recent years stories of their heroism have been revived and their contribution to their nation’s history recognised
Born only a year after a civil war that brought the emancipation of his people from slavery, Dennis Bell died a decorated military hero of his country. In June 1898 he and other Black American soldiers manned a daring mission under heavy fire to rescue fellow ser vicemen stranded at an enemy outpost. This act of heroism during the Spanish-American War led to Bell and three other rescuers receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor.
But history forgot Bell and his comrades. The Buffalo Soldiers, as they were known, who bravely fought to liberate Cuba from Spanish colonial rule became all but erased from later commemorations of the conflict. Only recently have we fully recovered the story of why Black Americans demanded the right to serve their country, how they contributed to its military success, and why the daring and determination they showed time and again on the battlefield was lost to public memory.
The Buffalo Soldiers came into being following the end of the American Civil War. In July 1866 Congress established a new peacetime militar y under the Army Reorganization Act. This led to the creation of six Black regiments, later reduced to four, the 9th and 10th Cavalr y and the 24th and 25th Infantry. Many of the men who served in these units, some of them former slaves, had fought for the Union during the war. Command of the regiments was entrusted mostly to white commissioned officers.
Stationed on the western frontier, the Black regiments earned a distinguished reputation for their role in the Indian Wars between 1867 and 1890. Eighteen African American soldiers received Congressional Medals of Honor for fighting in military campaigns that facilitated colonisation of the region and the fulfilment of the United States’ supposed ‘Manifest Destiny’.
The Native Americans who resisted settlement still had some admiration for the Black units who were among their fiercest adversaries. They came to call them ‘Buffalo Soldiers’. The meaning of the epithet remains a matter of dispute but is commonly understood to have been a reference to either or both the texture of the servicemen’s hair and their for titude in battle.
Black soldiers’ role in suppressing the indigenous peoples of the west was not without controversy, but it was also a source of pride to a Black American populace aspiring to take a fuller place in US society. Black newspaper The Afro-American Sentinel boasted how the same troops who whites once believed would
