Buffalo soldier, 98, doesn't want black history erased
When Clyde Robinson was drafted into the U.S. Army's 9th Cavalry Regiment in 1942, he had never heard of the buffalo soldiers. He did not know that he would become part of the storied, complicated legacy of the all-black regiments of the U.S. military.
Robinson served in the Philippines in World War II. Now 98 and living in Seattle, he proudly proclaims that he is the “last remaining buffalo soldier in Seattle and Tacoma.”
The all-black regiments patrolled new settlements in the West, built infrastructure that helped make westward expansion possible, and fought in every U.S. war after the Civil War until the U.S. Army was desegregated in 1948. However, despite their significant role in U.S. history, their own story has been largely untold.
“A lot of people still don't know, because they don't publicize it,” Robinson said. “White people not gonna tell you. Most of them don't even know what's the buffalo soldiers. No, they never teach that.”
This erasure was quite intentional, says Dr. Darrell Millner, professor emeritus of black studies at Portland State University. “Generally speaking, most people don't associate blacks with the Western story, the Western experience. They're surprised to hear that blacks were here and certainly surprised to hear that blacks were involved with some of the, what you might call iconic, experiences in the West,” Millner said. “For most of American history, it was not considered to be convenient to acknowledge that black people had the same qualities as those other people who came into the West — the potential for heroic behavior, the potential to be an explorer, the potential to be important in that difficult environment and circumstance.”
“You can't maintain a slave society and acknowledge that black people are capable of heroic acts and capable of significant contributions,” he said. “So that's why black people are dropped out of American history.”
In addition to their contributions to U.S. history, the buffalo soldiers helped to spread black culture in many locations in the Pacific Northwest at the time where black populations were small or nonexistent.
The legacies of these forgotten servicemen live on in their descendants and the people who continue to be inspired by their stories.
Dee Craig-Arnold is tall and stalwart just, she said, as was her grandfather Alfred Jerome Franklin, a sergeant in Company B of the buffalo soldiers' 24th Infantry Regiment. Like her grandfather, she also served in the armed forces.
Craig-Arnold, 79, of Portland, Ore., never knew her grandfather; he died one year before she was born and her family didn't really talk about him.
One of the few stories that was told is Franklin's account of the Battle of San Juan Hill, famously known as the decisive battle in the Spanish-American War in which Theodore Roosevelt is credited with heroically leading the charge to victory.
“The way the history books have depicted Teddy Roosevelt and the storming of the San Juan Hill, there's a part that they missed. Because he did storm it, but he got surrounded by the enemy, and the African-American soldiers, the buffalo soldiers, were sent up to rescue him,” she said.
Franklin's version of events is backed up by Jerome Tuccille's book, “The Roughest Riders: The Untold Story of the Black Soldiers in the Spanish-American War,” which corrects the narrative and attributes the all-black regiments with not only rescuing Roosevelt but also with doing the majority of the fighting.
