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MORE HEROES

© Dennis Morehouse

Until the lions have their historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter -African Proverb

This proverb applies to history also. History is written by the victors, and tends to be aimed at the largest audience that will buy the books. Minorities tend to get left out, due to the perception of not enough potential sales. Black history continues to draw more and more historians however, and is the subject of more and more study. There is plenty of Black history, and plenty of Black heroes. The internet is making it easier and easier to find them. The study really can't be limited to just one month out of the year, as people continue their lives and history year round.

Finding Black heroes in the period after the formal integration of the military services begins to be more difficult, though. It's fairly easy to look up units that were known to be all Black. It's much more difficult to pick out individuals in integrated units, so the growing numbers of web sites devoted to Black history are arriving just in time.

Officer ranks have nearly always had a much smaller percentage of blacks than the enlisted ranks, and there have been significant periods when there were no Black officers at all. But Black officers were around much earlier than I had supposed. The first ones known to serve in the colonies led an all black company in 1736, as part of a Spanish force during a campaign against the Natchez Indians. http://www.gohotline.com/africanamerican...

Social status was a very important consideration in the early colonies. The normal fears about arming slaves for any reason kept the numbers of Blacks down in the early militias, whether they were slave or free. This action unintentionally 'elevated' their status, however; as the only other men who were not required to serve were ministers and public officials, the 'cream' of society! Actively trying to prove that any other group is inferior to your own tends to make you look rather foolish. The 'solution' used to re establish their 'proper' place was to require them to provide free labor to the colony for the same length of time that militias were required to drill.

A slave named York was a member of the Lewis and Clark party, and was thought by many of the Indians they met to be the party's leader. A frequent mark of courage after a battle was to color their skin with charcoal, and since he was 'all black', he was regarded as extremely courageous.