Stowers, Freddie

Impact on the world

As a squad leader in the segregated 371st Infantry Regiment, attached to the French Army's 157th “Red Hand” Division, Stowers was part of the September 28, 1918, assault on Hill 188 in France's Champagne-Marne sector when German defenders appeared to surrender, then opened devastating machine-gun and mortar fire as the Americans advanced into the open, killing his company's lieutenant and senior noncommissioned officers within minutes; the 22-year-old corporal took command of the survivors, led an assault that destroyed the machine-gun position responsible, and continued crawling forward encouraging his men even after being mortally wounded, dying before the hill was secured. His commanding officer recommended him for the Medal of Honor immediately, but the paperwork was never processed — lost, whether through bureaucratic oversight or racial bias, for over seven decades — until a 1988 Army investigation into the absence of any Black World War I Medal of Honor recipients located the original recommendation, leading President George H.W. Bush to present the medal to Stowers's elderly sisters at a White House ceremony on April 24, 1991.

Life & background

Born January 12, 1896, in Sandy Springs, South Carolina, the fourth of ten children of Wylie and Annie Stowers, grandchildren of enslaved people, Stowers worked as a farmhand and was married to Pearl, with whom he had a daughter, Minnie Lee, before being drafted in October 1917 and trained at Camp Jackson, South Carolina. Assigned to Company C, 371st Infantry Regiment, part of the all-Black 93rd Infantry Division, he deployed to France in the spring of 1918 and was promoted from private first class to corporal that May, serving in the Lorraine sector before his fatal action at Hill 188 that September; his entire regiment received France's Croix de Guerre for its performance in the battle. He is buried at the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in France; his Medal of Honor recognition in 1991 directly prompted the Army to reexamine other overlooked cases, a review that led to the seven Black WWII Medal of Honor upgrades in 1997, several of whom are already profiled in this collection.

Sources

1. National Park Service; National Museum of African American History and Culture; South Carolina Encyclopedia; World War I Centennial Commission