Colonel Charles Young

Charles Young was the third Black graduate of West Point, the first Black military attaché in U.S. history, and the highest-ranking Black officer in the Army — until the military forced him into early retirement in 1917 to prevent him from becoming the first Black general. The official reason was high blood pressure; the real reason was racism. Young rode his horse 500 miles from Ohio to Washington, D.C., to prove his fitness, but the Army refused to reinstate him.

Born in May's Lick, Kentucky, in 1864, the son of formerly enslaved parents, Young entered West Point in 1884. He endured four years of hazing, ostracism, and abuse — his white classmates refused to speak to him — and graduated in 1889, ninth in his class. He served with distinction in the 9th Cavalry (Buffalo Soldiers), the Spanish-American War, and the Philippines.

Young served as military attaché to Haiti and Liberia, supervised road construction projects in Liberia, and was beloved by the troops he commanded. His forced retirement on the eve of World War I — when his leadership was most needed — was one of the most cynical acts of racial discrimination in American military history. He was eventually reinstated in 1918 but died of a kidney infection in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1922. His home in Wilberforce, Ohio, is now a National Monument.