Young, Charles

Impact on the world

Born enslaved and raised in the freedom community of Ripley, Ohio, Young endured five years of severe hazing and isolation at West Point — demerited 140 times, far above the norm — to graduate in 1889, becoming the last Black West Point graduate for 47 years after him (until Benjamin O. Davis Jr. in 1936). Over a 28-year career chiefly spent with the Buffalo Soldier regiments, he became the first African American superintendent of a U.S. national park (Sequoia, 1903), the first Black military attaché (to Haiti, then Liberia, where he trained the Liberian Frontier Force), and the first Black man to reach the rank of colonel in the Regular Army; in 1917, despite a 500-mile horseback ride from Ohio to Washington, D.C., to prove his physical fitness, the Army forced him into retirement on dubious medical grounds widely understood to be a maneuver to block his promotion to the first Black general — a recognition that, after his 1922 death, would not come to any African American officer for another 18 years. In 2022, a century after his death, Young was posthumously promoted to brigadier general in a ceremony at West Point.

Life & background

Born into slavery on March 12, 1864, in Mays Lick, Kentucky, to Gabriel Young, who escaped to enlist in a Black Union artillery regiment, and Arminta Young, who taught herself to read and instilled rigorous academic standards in her son, Charles was raised in Ripley, Ohio, graduating high school with honors and teaching at the local Black school before placing second in Ohio's 1883 West Point entrance exam, securing an appointment when the top candidate withdrew. After graduating in 1889 — sharing a dorm room for years with fellow Black cadet John Hanks Alexander — he served with the 9th and 10th Cavalry “Buffalo Soldiers,” the Spanish-American War, and the Philippine-American War, and personally mentored a young sergeant major named Benjamin O. Davis Sr., already profiled in this collection, encouraging him toward an officer's commission. Recalled to active duty for World War I after his forced retirement was publicly protested by Black leaders and even former President Theodore Roosevelt, Young was reinstated as a full colonel but never permitted to lead troops in the war itself, dying of a kidney infection while on a final assignment in Lagos, Nigeria, on January 8, 1922; he was buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery, and his Wilberforce, Ohio, home is now the Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument.

Sources

1. National Museum of the United States Army; Kentucky Center for African American Heritage; Audubon