American Patriots: A Young People's Edition: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm
240
American Patriots: A Young People's Edition: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm
240eBook
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Overview
Adapted for young readers, this dramatic story brings to life the heroism of people such as Crispus Attucks, Benjamin O. Davis, Charity Adams, and Colin Powell, and captures the spirit that drove these Americans to better their lives and demand of themselves the highest form of sacrifice.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307800169 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Children's Books |
| Publication date: | 09/28/2011 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
| Age Range: | 10 Years |
About the Author
Tonya Bolden is the author of Rock of Ages: A Tribute to the Black Church and Tell All the Children Our Story: Memories and Mementos of Being Young and Black in America.
Read an Excerpt
The Revolution
I served in the Revolution, in General Washington's army. . . . I have stood in battle, where balls, like hail, were flying all around me. The man standing next to me was shot by my side--his blood spouted upon my clothes, which I wore for weeks. My nearest blood, except that which runs in my veins, was shed for liberty. My only brother was shot dead instantly in the Revolution. Liberty is dear to my heart--I cannot endure the thought, that my countrymen should be slaves.
--"Dr. Harris," a veteran of the 1st Rhode Island, in an address to an anti-slavery society in Francestown, New Hampshire, 1842
By 1770, Crispus Attucks, the son of an African father and a Native American mother, had spent some twenty years at sea, having escaped slavery in Framingham, Massachusetts, when he was about twenty-seven years old.
On the night of March 5, 1770, Attucks was in Boston's King Street tavern when an alarm bell was heard from the street's British sentry. When Attucks led a stick- and bat-wielding group of fellows from the tavern, he discovered that the sentry was under "attack" only from snowball-throwing boys. Still, Attucks and his mob took the side of the boys against the Redcoats--using heavy sticks instead of snowballs. Witnesses said that Attucks, striking the first blow, caused arriving British soldiers to open fire. British musket shots hit eleven people, killing five: four white men and Crispus Attucks--the first to die, from two shots to the chest.
Some Bostonians had little regard for the victims. In his defense of the British soldiers, lawyer John Adams blamed Attucks for the mini riot, dismissing him as a rabble-rouser--
the leader of a gang of lowlifes and rowdies. The merchant John Hancock, like Adams a future signer of the Declaration of
Independence, also accused Attucks of provoking the "Boston Massacre"--but from a praiseworthy point of view. "Who taught the British soldier that he might be defeated?" Hancock later asked. "Who dared look into his eyes? I place, therefore, this Crispus Attucks in the foremost rank of the men that dared."
Although the British soldiers were acquitted from any wrongdoing, the Americans won the lion's share of public support and sympathy. Crispus Attucks and his companions became the first popular martyrs of the Revolution.
By the time of the Boston Massacre, Britain controlled North America from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River, as well as most of the islands that made up the West Indies. The debt Britain had incurred securing much of this territory during the French and Indian Wars (1689-1763) had led to heavy taxation of the thirteen colonies, which, in British eyes, existed only for the benefit of the mother country. The thirteen colonies, with a budding sense of nationhood, saw any form of taxation as slavery. The mother country's Sugar Act, Stamp Act, and other acts of taxation sparked bold acts of defiance, such as the "Boston Tea Party" on the night of December 16, 1773.
Black people also engaged in protest--against slavery. In 1773, Massachusetts courts and legislature saw several petitions from enslaved blacks, asking for their freedom along with, in one case, some "unimproved land" on which to build new lives. At the time, out of a total population of 2,600,000, in Britain's North American colonies, there were roughly 500,000 black people, with about 460,000 of them enslaved.
Quaker Philadelphia was the heart of early eighteenth-century abolitionism. Benjamin Franklin was among that city's early abolitionists. Anthony Benezet was another. "How many of those who distinguish themselves as Advocates of Liberty remain insensible," Benezet wrote in a 1766 pamphlet, "to the treatment of thousands and tens of thousands of our fellow men, who . . . are at this very time kept in the most deplorable state of slavery."
By the mid-1770s, Boston was the center of abolition as well as revolution. "No country can be called free where there is one slave," declared James Swan, a Boston merchant who had participated in the Boston Tea Party.
"It has always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me," wrote Abigail Adams, in the summer of 1774, to her husband, John, "to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have." By "we" Abigail was referring to the American colonies--not the Adams family, for they were not slaveholders. When Abigail wrote this letter, she was at home in Braintree, Massachusetts. John was in Philadelphia, at the First Continental Congress, where representatives from the colonies (except for Georgia) were meeting to discuss their grievances against Britain and ways to get them remedied.
By the spring of 1775, armed revolt seemed the only remedy to many. On March 23, at a convention in Richmond, Virginia, Patrick Henry, a slaveholder, raised the American battle cry with "Give me liberty or give me death!" By then, having anticipated trouble, the British had increased their troops in Boston. These troops were under the command of General Thomas Gage, who was also Royal Governor of Massachusetts.
New England towns and villages had been preparing for war since the winter of 1774. Weapons and gunpowder had been stored. Militiamen were armed and ready, as were Minutemen, an elite militia that could be "ready in a minute" and were organized after the Boston Tea Party. By April 1775, there was a growing number of Patriots ready to do battle against Britain--and with colonists who sided with the mother country, the Loyalists, also known as Tories.
In April 1775, British intelligence learned that a secret meeting in Concord of the illegal Massachusetts Congress had determined to establish an army. On April 18, General Gage ordered troops to proceed to Concord to seize all weapons and ammunition. An advance guard was also sent to Lexington because of similar rumors about an insurrection there.
As British soldiers left by boat across Back Bay late on the night of April 18, two signal lamps ("One if by land, two if by sea") were hung in the steeple of the Old North Church. The printer and silversmith Paul Revere was silently rowed across the Charles River, which was being watched by a heavily armed British warship. Once on shore, Revere mounted one of the fastest horses in the colony to warn first Lexington and then Concord that the British were coming.
In Lexington, Revere, by then joined by two other couriers, was briefly stopped by a British patrol, to whom he supplied "information," with a gun to his head. Armed with Revere's "information," the British patrol told their commanders that at least five hundred Minutemen were waiting on Lexington Green.
The several hundred British soldiers who approached the green early the next morning found a motley army of seventy-seven militiamen. The British Major Pitcairn ordered his troops not to fire and told the Americans to drop their weapons and
disperse. Lexington's militia, led by Captain John Parker, was not eager for battle, either. But just as Parker gave the order to withdraw, someone's musket fired (whether American or British is unknown). Scattered shots from both sides followed that first mysterious shot. Eight Americans died and nine were wounded before the shooting stopped.
Prince Easterbrooks, a Lexington slave, was one of the Americans who fought in Captain Parker's company in that first battle of the Revolution--a battle that lasted about fifteen minutes. Easterbrooks was also in the next quick (about five minutes) fight later that same morning: the Battle of Concord.
Entering Concord without resistance at around eight o'clock in the morning, the British found some four hundred Minutemen waiting at North Bridge. There's no mystery as to who fired first here: the British. The Patriots' return fire became known as the "shot heard round the world."
Three British and two Americans were killed before the Americans retreated, with many others from both sides wounded. Prince Easterbrooks, who was among the wounded, was not the only black Massachusetts militiaman defending North Bridge that day. The others included Peter Salem, of Framingham, who had been freed from slavery to enlist; Samuel Craft, of Newton; Caesar Ferrit and his son John, of Natick; and men known only by first names--Pompy, of Braintree (now Quincy), and Prince, of Brookline. Another black Patriot was Lemuel Haynes, who would become the first black ordained Congregational minister in America.
What People are Saying About This
A compulsive and humbling history of nobility in the face of American prejudice, and courage in the face of America's enemies. Buckley writes with grace and authority -- and an almost unearthly restraint.
A monumental work of love and scholarship. American Patriots fills a large
gap in the history of our country. Buckley documents, with great skill and
heart, the contribution of black American heroes in all of our nation's
wars.
—(Joseph Galloway, author of We Were Soldiers Once and Young)
Gail Buckley has given us a powerful account of a long and shamefully overlooked part of American military history—the heroic efforts of African-Americans to serve honorably and courageously in the armed forces when they were subjected to the worst kinds of racism. The full story is at once uplifting and deeply disturbing. We should all be grateful to Gail for bringing us these stories—and to the people about whom she writes for their determined patriotism.
There is no more central thread in American history than the struggle of
African-Americans to achieve freedom, equality, and dignity, and nowhere has
it been more poignantly fought than in uniform. American Patriots gathers
in one place the record of black American soldiers and sailors who for
centuries heroically served a nation that despised them. With their
courage, they lifts is all up. Buckley has written a fascinating, stirring
and important book.
—(Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down)
Gail Buckley's American Patriots unveils a forgotten but essential strand in the fabric of American history. This fine book recalls the bravery and sacrifice of black soldiers who believed in the ultimate promise of American life—and fought and died for a nation that systematically denied them that promise. American Patriots is a noble work of recovered memory.
Gail Buckley tells a gripping story about an unsung group of American
heroes and the America for which they fought, from the time of the redcoats
to Saddam Hussein. In Korea and Vietnam I fought alongside the sort of
warriors who make up her story. They were America's best. At last their
story is told and told brilliantly. should be required
reading for soldier and civilian alike.
—(Col. David H. Hackworth, author of About Face)
Reading Group Guide
1. Midway through the Revolutionary War, blacks comprised 15 percent of the Continental Army–yet many nineteenth-century abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and John Greenleaf Whittier refused to celebrate July 4 as Independence Day. Consider the reasons for their refusal. Why did they, at the same time, continue to look to the Revolution for inspiration and to call for a “second revolution”?
2. By the end of the Civil War, blacks made up 10 to 12 percent of the Union Army. Describe these black fighters. Whom did they fight under? And why, then, did Lincoln’s War Department insist on calling the Civil War a “white man’s war”? Contrast Lincoln’s description of the Civil War as a war about “union” with the South’s belief that it was about slavery. Which was it?
3. How did the former Confederacy bring about its own Reconstruction? Explain why General Carl Schurz’s 1865 report displeased President Andrew Johnson. Evaluate how the Reconstruction benefited poor whites as well as blacks, and how black military participation paved the way to change in political and civil rights.
4. Discuss the reasons behind Congress’s creation of the first permanent black units in a peacetime standing army. What did these units contribute to the “New Army”?
5. Describe how the slave system gave the military a particularly Southern mind-set. How did this affect the first blacks sent to West Point and Annapolis–particularly Henry O. Flipper and Johnson Whittaker? What lessons can we learn from Flipper’s story?
6. Buckley calls Southern revisionism the means by which the South“won” the peace. Examine how revisionism affected blacks in the First World War. Explain why black Americans fought under a French flag. How did their military experience affect their behavior back home?
7. World War II brought extraordinary changes in black military opportunities despite a total and enforced segregation in all branches of the service. How did civilians like Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter White of the NAACP, A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and members of the black press influence this change? What was FDR’s contribution to these changes? What inspired blacks to fight for freedoms abroad that they did not enjoy at home? Drawing on specific examples, examine how black members of the Tuskegee Airmen, the Montford Point Marines, and the 6888 explained their own decisions.
8. Analyze President Harry Truman’s decision to desegregate the military in the summer of 1948. Was he motivated by principle or by politics? How did the military respond?
9. At the start of the Korean War, the 24th Infantry was the last all-black unit in the Army. Trace its path from winning the first battle of the war, and the first Medal of Honor, to being deactivated for cowardice. Why was the 24th a scapegoat for both integrationists and segregationists? Explain how Korea-era McCarthyism affected the military career of Sergeant Edward Carter, World War II winner of the second highest military honor. How did President Clinton put Edward Carter back into history?
10. Why was the 1965 Army known as “the Kennedy Class”? Discuss Colin Powell’s belief in the early 1960s that the military offered the best career in America for an ambitious young black man. What happened between 1965 and 1968 that led to the “breakdown” of the U. S. Army? Examine how military changes reflected changes in American society.
11. Evaluate the all-volunteer army and the war in the Persian Gulf as antidotes to Vietnam. Compare Operation Desert Storm to the Spanish-American War. In what ways was the Gulf War historic and unique? What values and lessons instilled by the military are most applicable to civilian life? Discuss how the military, once one of the most racist institutions in America, became one of the greatest places of opportunity.