At a Civil War battlefield in Mississippi, there’s a new effort to include more Black history

VICKSBURG, Madam. — Thelma Sims Dukes grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in a remote Mississippi town steeped in Civil War history.

As a little black girl, she walked to school through Vicksburg National Military Park — the hilly battlefield where Union and Confederate soldiers fought and died over whether the U.S. would continue to allow slavery in the South.

Union forces won a crucial campaign in 1863 to capture the city of Vicksburg and gain control of the Mississippi River, hastening the end of the war. But during Dukes’ youth, Vicksburg revered the Confederacy and ignored the history of black soldiers who fought for the Union, including her great-great-grandfather, William “Bill” Sims.

“The superintendents and the museum curators said we didn’t fight in the Civil War,” Dukes said recently.

The courage and service of Black soldiers to the country is no longer ignored, thanks to the efforts of historians, park staff and citizens like Dukes. On a crisp morning in mid-February, Dukes and her niece, Sara Sims, and four park employees—two of them black men wearing reproductions of U.S. Army uniforms from the Civil War—placed American flags on thirteen graves where a group of recently identified black soldiers are buried at the Vicksburg National Cemetery, which is part of the military park.

A historian who worked for the military park, Beth Kruse, identified the soldiers through research of military documents, newspapers and other sources. Their remains lie beneath white marble headstones engraved with numbers instead of names, as do most of the veterans buried in the cemetery.

In recent years, the National Park Service has broadened the way it presents history in parks across the country. At the Vicksburg Military Park, which is littered with more than 1,400 monuments, markers and tablets and is one of the largest tourist attractions in Mississippi, drawing visitors from all over the world, the visitor center now features information about black history and a monument for Black soldiers were inducted twenty years ago.

Sunlight dappled the graves beneath a towering magnolia tree during the Feb. 14 flag-planting ceremony. Dukes said the men and other Black Union soldiers were “freedom fighters” not just for themselves but for all Americans.

“They’re not strangers anymore,” she said. “This is a start. This is good. Let’s set the record straight.”

The newly identified soldiers had enlisted in the Vicksburg-based 1st Mississippi Infantry (African Descent) because the city was under federal occupation. Early in 1864, 18 soldiers and two white officers traveled by boat some 93 miles north along the Mississippi River to Chicot County, Arkansas, to forage for crops to feed people and horses.

On February 14, 1864, irregular Confederate troops from Missouri at Ross Landing near the town of Lake Village shot Union soldiers and officers, killing most and leaving some for dead. According to Kruse’s research, they used the Union soldiers’ bayonets to impale the dead and wounded and pin them to the ground.

Brendan Wilson, director of interpretation, education and partnerships for Vicksburg National Military Park, said on the 160th anniversary of the horrific day at Ross Landing that it is still not known which of the 13 black soldiers from that massacre is in which specific grave. Records show where the group is buried.

“And now we have their names and we can bring those names back to life,” Wilson said.

Kruse works in Vicksburg through the National Park Service’s Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellows program. She said at least 11 soldiers from the 1st Mississippi Infantry (African Descent) were previously enslaved on Southern plantations.

“For these soldiers, it wasn’t an abstract ideology,” she said. “They knew what it was like to be unfree.”

Vicksburg National Cemetery was founded in 1866 and now houses more than 18,000 graves: veterans from six wars and some former park employees. More than 17,000 of them fought for the Union in the Civil War, including more than 5,500 black soldiers, who were designated United States Colored Troops by the U.S. War Department in 1863.

Vicksburg is the largest cemetery for Union soldiers and sailors, with the dead coming from Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and other states. Nearly 13,000 are buried as unknown.

About 5,000 Confederate soldiers are buried in a city cemetery in Vicksburg, outside the military park.

Some 80 years after the end of the Civil War, Dukes’ father worked in maintenance at the national military park. She said she has always loved the landscape of the former battlefield, but when she was young she didn’t see any of the history there as relevant to the black community.

“All I know is that the South lost. Okay, I knew that,” Dukes said. “But none of the battles as we learn them now. I didn’t feel like it had any connection to the blacks.”

In 2004, Vicksburg National Military Park dedicated a monument honoring the black soldiers who fought in the Vicksburg Campaign. The troops played a crucial role in the Union victory at Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, along the Mississippi River north of Vicksburg, in June 1863. Robert Major Walker, a historian who was elected Vicksburg’s first black mayor in 1988 , proposed the monument in 1999 after working for many years. conduct research and secure funding for it.

“Something had to be done to show the involvement of black people in the Civil War,” Walker said recently. ‘So much positive stuff had been left out of the history books. Everyone had to know the truth.”

Dukes, whose great-great-grandfather fought at Milliken’s Bend and survived the war, criticizes efforts by some Republican governors, including Ron DeSantis of Florida and Tate Reeves of Mississippi, to restrict the teaching of slavery and other difficult aspects of American history.

“And I don’t understand why the majority of people in America don’t say, ‘No, you can’t do that. Let’s tell it all,” Dukes said.

Three days after the American flags were placed at the cemetery, Dukes joined others at the military park visitors center for a libation ceremony, a traditional African religious ritual, to pay tribute to the twenty men killed or wounded at Ross Landing .

Albert Dorsey Jr., a professor of history at Jackson State University, read each man’s name — black and white — as he poured water into a pot of soil and grass, a small patch of soil brought inside for the cold day:

Pvt. Henry Berry, Pvt. Calvin Cathron, 1st Lieutenant Thaddeus Cock, Pvt. Howard Dixon, Corp. Fleming Epps, Pvt. Ruffian Epps, Corp. Peter Everman, Pvt. Charles Farrar, Pvt. Henry Ford, Pvt. John Genefa, Pvt. Anthony Data, Pvt. Richard James, Sgt. Tony McGee, Sgt. Noah Powell, Pvt. Thomas Ransom, 1st Sgt. James Spencer, Pvt. Isaac Stanton, Pvt. Isom Taylor, Corp. Nelson Walker, Pvt. James H. Boldin.

After each name, the audience of about fifty people responded: “Asé,” pronounced ah-SHAY, a word from the Yoruba language spoken in parts of West Africa. It is similar to ‘Amen’, an affirmation of a life force.

The 13 black men killed in the massacre were initially buried in Ross Landing and later buried as unknowns in the cemetery. Three others were wounded and died during or shortly after the Civil War, and were also buried as unknowns. Two others survived until 1918. The bodies of the two white officers had been identified and sent to Ohio and Indiana for burial during the war.

Kruse told the audience that the black men who joined the Union army “did not grovel for inclusion,” but actively chose to fight.

“As President Lincoln noted of the dead at Gettysburg,” Kruse said, “we too can recognize the men who lay in the hallowed grounds of Vicksburg National Cemetery and never forget what they did for freedom.”