Flipper, Henry Ossian

Impact on the world

Enduring four years of near-total social isolation and racial hostility as one of the first Black cadets at West Point, Flipper graduated in 1877 and became the first nonwhite officer to lead Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry, distinguishing himself as an engineer — his malaria-fighting drainage project at Fort Sill, still in use today, was designated a National Historic Landmark as “Flipper's Ditch” in 1977 — and as a field officer in the Apache Wars. In 1881 a hostile commanding officer engineered his removal as quartermaster and court-martial on embezzlement charges, of which he was acquitted, though he was convicted of the lesser charge of “conduct unbecoming an officer” and dismissed in 1882, ending the Army's only Black officer corps presence for over a decade; Flipper spent the rest of his life seeking exoneration, which arrived only after his death — an honorable discharge in 1976 and a full presidential pardon from Bill Clinton in 1999.

Life & background

Born into slavery on March 21, 1856, in Thomasville, Georgia, the eldest of five sons whose father purchased his own and his wife's freedom from a wealthy slave trader, Flipper attended schools run by the American Missionary Association and enrolled at Atlanta University in 1869 before receiving a West Point appointment in 1873, becoming the fifth Black cadet admitted and the first to graduate, in 1877. Commissioned a second lieutenant, he served at Forts Sill, Elliott, Concho, Quitman, and Davis in Texas and Indian Territory, where he wrote The Colored Cadet at West Point (1878), one of the earliest African American autobiographies, before his 1882 dismissal. He went on to a distinguished four-decade civilian career in the Southwest and Mexico as the nation's first Black civil and mining engineer, surveyor, Spanish translator, special agent for the Department of Justice, and assistant to the Secretary of the Interior in Venezuela and Alaska; he died in Atlanta on April 26, 1940, and West Point now awards the annual Henry O. Flipper Award to graduating cadets who exemplify “leadership, self-discipline, and perseverance in the face of unusual difficulties.”

Sources

1. National Park Service; American Battlefield Trust; Texas State Historical Association (Handbook of Texas)