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Two weeks have passed since you arrived at the U.S. Military Academy to prepare for your entrance exams. You and the rest of your squad of prospective cadets are waiting for your turn to have your shoes shined in a crowded boot black shop. You and your roommate, Michael Howard, the only other black candidate, stand in the doorway at the back of the line. Behind you, a white candidate named McCord wanders back and forth on the porch. You lock eyes with him as he uses a pocket knife to scrape dried mud off his boots.

His stare is menacing, but you refuse to avert your gaze. He puts his knife in his pocket and walks towards you, his shoulder slamming into Howard's as he pushes his way into the shop. Move. Howard says nothing. You tap McCord on the shoulder. Hey, watch it. What did you just say? Howard shakes his head fiercely, silently warning you to be quiet. But you can't help yourself. I said you better watch where you're going. I'll go wherever I please.

Your friend should learn to get out of my way. McCord steps forward and slaps Howard across the face. He stumbles, nearly losing his balance. You steady him and then turn back to McCord, clenching your fists. You feel the heat of the squad's stares. What gives you the right to strike him? What gives me the right? I'm an officer in the United States Army. You're not an officer yet.

You haven't even passed your entrance exam, same as the rest of us. And besides, officers don't strike their soldiers. McCord reaches into the pocket where he stashed his knife. You know what I think? I think I ought to cut you open. You're about to respond when Howard grabs you by the elbow and steers you away from McCord and out of the shop. Let go of me. I won't let him think he can intimidate us. Come on. It's not worth it.

Howard drags you away, and you reluctantly fall into step behind him. But you're already making plans to appeal to your superiors. You feel that if you don't take steps to stand up to bigotry now, your classmates will make the next four years a living nightmare. Thank you to our partner, Mentos Gum.

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In the spring of 1870, James Webster Smith and Michael Howard arrived at West Point, New York with the hopes of becoming the first black cadets in the history of the U.S. military academy. They quickly became targets of harassment. In June, a white candidate named Robert McCord struck Howard for not moving out of his way as he entered a boot black shop.

Howard and Smith reported the incident up the chain of command, but West Point officials concluded that they had exaggerated their claims in an effort to cause trouble. After this and several other incidents, Howard failed his entrance exam and returned home, leaving Smith to enter the academy alone. His time there was marked by isolation, abuse, and injustice.

To discuss the integration of West Point during Reconstruction, I'm joined by Lieutenant Colonel Rory McGovern, an associate professor in the Department of History at West Point and the co-author of Race, Politics, and Reconstruction, The First Black Cadets at Old West Point. Lieutenant Colonel Rory McGovern, welcome to American History Tellers. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Let's begin our conversation on June 14th, 1877. It's graduation day at West Point, but it's a special graduation, the graduation of Henry Ossian Flipper. Set the stage for us. What was this day like? So it was a sunny day.

The graduation stage and seating area and chairs in the audience were set up amongst this grove of maple trees that provided some shade just outside the barracks. And this was on the edge of West Point's famous plane. So picture beautiful weather, a morning breeze, soft morning breeze, and about 1030 in the morning, the band at West Point strikes up their martial music and plays

Out come marching the graduating class of 1877. Assembled on and around the stage are Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, a hero from the Civil War and still serving in the Army and one of the speakers at the graduation ceremony. The superintendent of West Point, Major General John Schofield, has

as well as commanding general of the army, William Tecumseh Sherman, and a number of dignitaries and guests and family members of the cadets. The ceremony would have gone largely as every other ceremony before it.

There would be a speech from the president of board of visitors, a speech from General Hancock as an invited guest speaker, and a speech from the superintendent. And then they would start awarding the diplomas, what West Pointers at the time called their sheepskin. Eventually, they get to Henry Oceane Flipper, and here is where this ceremony is unique, because Henry Oceane Flipper is the first black cadet to graduate from West Point. And according to accounts of the ceremony, as his name is called,

General Sherman signaled his approval with what was described in multiple sources as a hearty applause. And once Sherman started applauding, the applause became more general. It's a little unusual for a cadet at this point in the roster, as Flipper was, to receive a general applause. And we know it's unusual because newspaper reporters commented on it.

And by all accounts, Flipper paused for a moment, maybe somewhat surprised at the reception, given what he had experienced in four years at West Point, and appeared to bow his head in silent recognition, and then walked off the stage, and the ceremony continued. Well, let's talk about everything he had been through and go back a few years to when Flipper arrived at West Point in 1873. I guess let's start with what was the state of the academy in the wake of the Civil War?

This was troubled ground for the Academy, as a matter of fact. The Academy was still generally well-regarded in American society, but it was in a low point of public esteem for a number of reasons.

The first one was that anyone who lived through the Civil War and paid attention was aware that there were a number of West Point graduates who had fought for the Confederacy, fought for the South, and had committed treason and had shed blood of United States Army soldiers.

So its critics accused West Point of being what some of them called a henhouse of treason, what some of them called a nursery of treason, because of those resignations and because of those West Point alumni who had been Confederate officers.

A second strand of criticism against West Point at the time was that it was a finishing school for aristocrats. This strand of criticism had its most prominent mouthpieces in Congress among those who had compiled excellent records for

during the Civil War, but felt that they had had opportunities denied them because they did not graduate from West Point. They were volunteer officers in the Army. So people like General John Logan, who eventually became a senator from Illinois, people like Representative Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, who served at high rank in

as major generals in the Union Army, but felt that their military careers during the war had been stifled because they didn't have a West Point background. Now, at the same time, it's the 1870s, and the landscape in American higher education was changing. Before the war, a few institutions had become integrated institutions. So take Oberlin, for example.

But around the time when we see James Webster Smith as the first Black cadet admitted to West Point, around the time that he's navigating West Point, we also see the first Black students navigating other institutions like Harvard.

And the same year that Henry O. Flipper became the first Black graduate of West Point, Brown University also produced its first Black graduate. And how did West Point react to the growing wave of integration in education? This is interesting. You can see in the archive, West Point's a little ambivalent to what's going on with racial integration at other institutions.

That is not to say, though, that the idea of integration was popular at West Point. It was not, not by a long shot. And the unpopularity of it is what came to frame and define the experience of Henry O. Flipper and James Webster Smith and other Black cadets of the era. Well, let's talk more about these first cadets. How did West Point begin to admit them? Were the criteria for their admission the same for white candidates?

There's no application to West Point, so there's no way in which West Point itself as an institution has decided we are going to integrate. So what would happen is that congressmen would nominate a cadet from their district. And this starts in the late 1860s with Benjamin Butler trying to nominate...

the son of a veteran of the war who had served with the all-black 55th Massachusetts, the sister regiment to the famous 54th Massachusetts Regiment. And he tried to nominate Charles Sumner Wilson to West Point. But Wilson, however, was just too young. Once nominated, a young man at the time, we would not see women nominated for cadetships at West Point until 1976.

So once a young man was nominated, they would arrive at West Point, report for duty at West Point, and they would be referred to then as prospective cadets. Now in 1870...

we see the first successful nominations of black cadets. And that was James Webster Smith from South Carolina, in addition to Michael Howard from Mississippi. Both Howard and Smith received their nominations in May 1870, and both of them showed up to West Point before the end of the month.

As they report, they have to face first a medical exam and then an academic exam. And the academic exam was incredibly attritional. It was not uncommon in those days for up to half of prospective cadets to fail the exam. And you've seen the exam that West Point used at the time. If perhaps West Point knew that Black cadets were coming in...

Was there any indication at all that these exams or admission procedures at all were changed for these cadets to perhaps root them out? There was certainly the suspicion that it had because James Webster Smith and Michael Howard, being the first black prospective cadets, took the exam in 1870. And the failure rate in 1870 far exceeded the failure rate in years before it.

So there certainly was a suspicion that this was the smoking gun, this was West Point trying to make sure that black cadets would not get admitted. Because in fact, in 1870, a majority of those who took the exam failed it, to include Michael Howard. James Webster Smith passed. I've seen the exam. It's hard. I would be surprised, actually, if modern students could pass the exam. But I've also seen the records on all the decisions leading up to the exam.

And all the decisions about what the exam would look like and its level of difficulty were made not only well before Smith and Howard showed up, but also well before they were even nominated. I believe the historical record shows that this was just an overcorrection on the exam that made it hard for everybody and was not making it overly difficult for any one particular group.

So then at long last, we have our first Black cadet admitted to West Point. This is a long experience and a very difficult one for these men. They have to be nominated, then admitted, and then they have to endure several years of mistreatment and rigorous classes, and then they actually have to graduate. In total, how many completed this gauntlet? West Point ran on a very attritional model. It wasn't just the entrance exam. It was the whole academic program was incredibly attritional.

Picture that for this window from 1870 to 1889, that this is the window of West Point's first experience with racial integration. For the first half of that, with one exception, all the nominations are coming out of the South.

And the vast majority of those young black men being nominated from the South started their lives in a state of slavery, which imposed unbelievable limitations on their education.

So when you think of the handicap that they have even taking an entrance exam, that's already a tritting close to 50% of their white counterparts who do not have an enslaved upbringing. When you picture that, it's going to take an almost superhuman effort to overcome that deficit.

There were, between 1870 and 1889, 27 young black men who we know of were nominated. Twelve gained admission to the academy, and only three graduated. ♪

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Now, while it was novel for West Point to receive Black cadets, it was absolutely unheard of for these Black cadets to find themselves at West Point. This was a very new environment for them. What was it like? Where did they live? Where did they eat? How was their life on campus? It's hard to put into words how difficult it was for them. Henry O. Flipper left us a memoir of his time at West Point where it becomes clear

painfully obvious throughout the memoir just how much the isolation of the experience affected him. There are a few things in his memoir that appear in every single chapter, and one of them is some commentary on just how badly he was isolated. I said earlier that this was unpopular at West Point, and the reason why this was unpopular is because within American society at the time,

People drew sharp distinctions between what they called either political or civic equality, your right to access the political system and your right to benefit from the legal system. And they drew this sharp distinction with social equality, on the other hand, your right

right to access public spaces, your right to access certain professions. So it was entirely possible at that time in American history for somebody to be, have been leading up to and during and in the early years of the Civil War, an out-and-out abolitionist and come through on the back end of the Civil War, confirmed in those beliefs and

an advocate for radical reconstruction, but also to not be a believer in social equality and to take offense and affront where you see integration of the races within certain professions, public spaces. Some people interpreted integration at West Point to be an affront. Black cadets during this initial period of reconstruction were segregated. So take, for example, James Webster Smith.

When he reports as a prospective cadet, he's put into a room with Michael Howard because Michael Howard is another prospective black cadet. However, after the academic exam, Michael Howard has to depart the academy. James Webster Smith marches out with the rest of the class for a summer encampment, and he's put into a tent by himself. And during the academic year, he occupies a barracks room by himself. And he only gets roommates when other black cadets show up.

In Smith's last year at the Academy, his fourth year, there are admitted two black cadets, Henry O. Flipper and a young man by the last name of Williams, and they all room together. For eating accommodations, there was no real option to segregate. There was one mess hall and everybody had to eat there. This did cause some controversy. There are plenty of instances of white cadets who

refusing to sit and eat next to black cadets or demanding that their tables be changed, their seating assignments be changed. In James Webster Smith's case, what you see are cadets trying to deny him food. They would insist that as white cadets, they got to eat first. And then as soon as they got their helpings, they would pass all of their food serving platters, the serving platters to the other side of the table and

try to keep him away from the food for the duration that they were allowed to be there. Black cadets were also isolated socially. West Point had a code of silencing. Sometimes they referred to it as cutting.

But a cut cadet or a silenced cadet was a cadet to whom nobody would speak unless duty compelled them to. Silencing itself was something that in the past, prior to this period of integration, had been applied to cadets who had been caught stealing, lying, or doing any other offense that cadets found to be socially dishonorable.

Once we get into the period of integration, it's a practice that is applied to every Black cadet that showed up. And this is just devastating for Black cadets. So naturally, as they go through a demanding curriculum that...

is asking them to tackle advanced math, foreign languages, the English language, engineering, natural and experimental philosophy, which is a 19th century version of physics, chemistry. As they're navigating this curriculum, they cannot rely on each other in the same way that their white counterparts can.

And I would imagine silencing, a tradition of abuse ingrained at West Point, is the least of it. We know that they faced all sorts of different abuse. That's true. Here's where James Webster Smith's story is particularly important. As the first admitted Black cadet, he entered an environment where the Corps of Cadets' response was one of active resistance.

It is 1870. There are Southern states being readmitted. So you actually do see some cadets being admitted to West Point who have relatives who are Confederate veterans. While maybe their Black counterparts had started life enslaved, you do have some white cadets who started life as enslavers. So this is kind of a volatile mix, and you throw in discipline.

And it doesn't go well. So when James Webster Smith reports, what we see is active resistance. In his first month at the academy, he's physically assaulted. At one point, he and Michael Howard, before the academic exam, were sleeping in their room and somebody broke into their room and upended a bucket of urine and feces and other waste all over them. When he joins the summer encampment,

He reports having a sleepless night because these tents that are out there in the summer encampment, they are pitched on top of wooden platforms. And after he goes into his tent, a couple of white cadets gather in the darkness and they scratch at the tent flaps. And then they have an audible conversation about the best way to pry the floorboards loose so they can pour gunpowder underneath and blow it all up with Smith in it.

In addition to that, he's assaulted while trying to gather water from a well. He's assaulted with a heavy wooden ladle and finds that he has to fight back with his own ladle.

So they're really terrorizing him. You're describing a West Point that is largely at war with itself and the changing times. These Black cadets felt the brunt of this war, of course. But I also wonder what was happening at the top. Those officers and administrators that are able to witness and make decisions, what did they do to perhaps address the racism and attacks on Black cadets?

It's a hard question to answer. West Point has a long and proud history, and we should and ought to be proud of those cadets who endured what they endured in the effort to graduate or in the case of Henry O. Flipper and John Hanks Alexander in 1887 and Charles Young in 1889 did endure to graduate.

But West Point does not have a lot to be proud of in how it conducted itself as an institution as it was integrating. A lot of the hurdles that arose, a lot of the obstacles that arose for black cadets at West Point at the time could and should have been removed by leadership. And they were not. There's a perhaps less physical but even more devious example

that's trying to leverage West Point's disciplinary system to get Smith kicked out. So what would happen is that when wrongdoings were committed against Smith,

He would report them, as he was told to do. And the Commandant, Emery Upton, at the time, who was a committed abolitionist and saw himself as committed to this cause of integrating West Point, would take Smith's report and say, that's not right, I'll look into it, I'll investigate it. And then he would go to the cadets accused and ask them very directly, did you kick Cadet Smith in formation? They'd say, no.

And so he'd ask other cadets who would have been in the vicinity in the same formation, you know, Smith alleges that he was kicked. Did you see that happen? And they would say no. And after he got about anywhere between three and five cadets refuting the original charge, Upton would then write Smith up for making false charges and place him under arrest and investigate him.

Because as much as Upton was committed to this project, he was such an institutionalist that he couldn't fathom that a West Point cadet would lie to him. In his first year at the Academy, Smith endured one court of inquiry, which is one step below a court-martial, and two formal courts-martial. In the two courts-martial, he was found guilty, and ultimately he was sentenced to dismissal.

So Smith spends his entire first year, almost all of it under close arrest. Close arrest means you're confined to your room. You can only go to and from class and to and from the dining facility. And that is it.

So at the very end, the Grant administration overturns the sentence and they send back a powerfully worded statement that says something to the effect of that Cadet Smith's very presence at the Academy should be taken as a single piece of evidence that he should be there. And so they accept the verdict, overturn the sentence, and change the sentence from dismissal to repeating that first year at the Academy.

And President Ulysses Grant's action of overturning the verdict changes the environment. Cadets see now that politicians will not allow him to go away, so they actually change their approach away from this active form of resistance based on violence, and they change it to a more passive form of resistance that's based on silencing and violence.

soul-crushing isolation in the hopes that that will make a cadet opt to leave. So while we do see cadets who come after Smith suffer some violent assaults, notably Johnson Chestnut Whitaker,

In most cases, violence is of a petty, occasional nature, and the largest hurdle that they're dealing with is the social isolation imposed by this code of silencing. So it very well could be said that James Webster Smith paved the way for Henry O. Flipper and all other Black cadets that followed to be successful in terms of just reducing the amount of abuse and violence to be endured.

I believe that. I've argued that in pieces that I've written, that without James Webster Smith's staying power, without his endurance, I cannot properly express how terrible that first year was for him.

That his staying power, his persistence beyond it, was what allowed Henry O. Flipper to graduate in 1877. Even if Smith's own story ends short of graduation and ultimately ends tragically, Smith's story is that he endures that horrible first year, is sentenced to repeat his first year,

Goes on for three more years. So he's at the end of his fourth year at the Academy, and he fails his exam in natural and experimental philosophy. At West Point in the 19th century, if you fail one of your academic exams, you're going to be declared academically deficient, and you're going to be dismissed from the Academy. So James Webster Smith was dismissed.

He was hired on the basis of the education and training that he received at West Point to go to South Carolina at what's now South Carolina State to teach military science to their own cadets. And this was an integrated institution at the time. But within two years, he died of tuberculosis. So Smith's story...

is largely lost to us because traces of it exist in the archives. You have to really dig. What most people know of James Webster Smith, they only know what Henry O. Flipper included in his memoir. And that gives us a very mixed picture of Smith. But what I've found in my own research is that Smith really is the undersung hero in this story. Flipper certainly is a hero in this story as well.

Smith is the one that we don't fully appreciate. And he's the one that made the graduation of black cadets like Henry O. Flipper possible. At 24, I lost my narrative or rather it was stolen from me. And the Monica Lewinsky that my friends and family knew was usurped by false narratives, callous jokes and politics. I,

I would define reclaiming as to take back what was yours. Something you possess is lost or stolen, and ultimately you triumph in finding it again. So I think listeners can expect me to be chatting with folks, both recognizable and unrecognizable names, about the way that people have navigated roads to triumph.

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So, of course, though, we did have the first Black cadet to graduate, Henry O. Flipper. But tell us a little bit about the ones who followed in his footsteps. So, John Hanks Alexander became the second in 1887, and Charles Young became the third in 1889. We honestly don't know too much about Alexander or his time here.

Because the tragic fact is that he died young. He was assigned to a Buffalo Soldier Regiment. And after serving some time in the Buffalo Soldier Regiment, was transferred to teach tactics and military science at Wilberforce University, where he died of an aortic rupture.

Charles Young graduated in 1889, also assigned for service in Buffalo Soldier Regiments. Now, Young, though, his career is long, and he's very successful. And what we see is after he gets past 1894, basically everything Young faces, he's the first black officer to do everything.

He becomes the first black troop commander, the first black squadron commander. He becomes the first black officer to be promoted to colonel. However, he's still following this awfully constricted career path where there are two cavalry regiments that he's available for assignment towards. And if not there, he must be teaching at a black or predominantly black college.

So that takes him all the way to 1917. And in 1917, of course, we enter World War I. And at the time, Young was a colonel. There are a lot of people who are very concerned that anybody who is a colonel will necessarily be a general. And what they've been able to do with Charles Young so far in his career is make sure that where he was in positions of command, he would never command white troops.

And if he became a general, that was impossible. So he was medically retired. Now, Young questioned this, thought that he was in great health. So he, to protest the decision, got on a horse in Kansas and rode it to Washington, D.C. to prove his fitness and asked for a re-examination.

They reexamined him. They brought him back onto active duty as a colonel. However, they assigned him to service as the army attache in Liberia. And he served there until his death in the early 1920s. So that was the third graduate, Charles Young, who graduated in 1889. But the fourth graduate

did not graduate into 1936, a large gap. What happened here? Once Reconstruction ends, you see congressmen willing to take the political risk to nominate a Black cadet to West Point almost falls off a cliff. It comes down to a trickle. Once Young graduates in 1889, we are over a decade out of Reconstruction, and we are into the Jim Crow era.

There are a couple young black men nominated to the Academy in World War I, but they do not last long. They're out after six months or a year. And there's no African Americans in uniform at West Point until 1907. And in 1907, the Army makes a decision to change how it's resourcing the cavalry detachment that's stationed at West Point.

And it was a widely held belief that the best horsemen in the Army were the Buffalo Soldier Regiment. So they made a Buffalo Soldier detachment that was staffed from the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments.

and brought it to West Point to train cadets on horsemanship and cavalry tactics. And the horse detachment was a Buffalo soldier detachment from 1907 until the cavalry was disbanded in the U.S. Army in 1947.

These troopers would have been training cadets on horsemanship, on cavalry drills, on cavalry tactics. They could learn on the field in front of the cavalry barracks on the south end of post. And also West Point built an indoor riding hall, which is still in use today, though, as a classroom building. It's where my office is. It's where I teach. But they continued to be subjected to training.

A lot of the norms and standards that arose during the era of Jim Crow, their barracks were put at the far end of post. They had to endure indignities, for example, not being allowed to walk through the main post area. And when we think of their tenure here from 1907 to 1947,

You can think of all the military figures whose names loom large in American history. Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, every general you can think of who helped to win World War II was shaped while at West Point by this horse detachment. When then did the fate of Black West Point cadets finally change?

Oh, it took a long time. It was nearly a century after this first period of integration. So Charles Young graduated in 1889. And then the fourth black graduate was Benjamin O. Davis Jr. in 1936. Benjamin O. Davis Jr.'s experience at West Point from 1932 to 1936 was almost identical to Henry O. Flipper's. He was silenced. He was treated poorly.

And the optimist in me always wants to believe that progress is a steady arc upward. So once we get beyond World War II and we get into the 50s, then there is some Black presence in most classes. That presence doesn't get into the double digits until the 60s. How are these early Black cadets remembered at West Point today?

Annually, there's a dinner given in honor of Henry O. Flipper, and it's more a banquet to present an award for a cadet who has shown considerable perseverance in the face of adversity. That's what Flipper's story is. Flipper's story ultimately is a story of heroic persistence and that of other Black cadets from this initial period of Reconstruction.

Most cadets in their freshman year, they take a class on the history of the Army. Most cadets are exposed to Flipper's story during that course. Now, the memory of Flipper went through a long arc because, of course, Flipper was driven out of the Army in the 1880s after being court-martialed and dismissed. And the 19th century dismissal was equivalent to what we would call today an other-than-honorable discharge.

Interest in Flipper spiked once we got up to the centenary of his graduation. And descendants of the Flipper family and a very committed educator named Ray McCall...

started digging into the case, conducting research, and the Army in 1977 changed Flipper's characterization service to an honorable discharge, which allowed Flipper to be reinterred with full military honors. And it also was the origin story of this annual dinner at West Point in honor of Flipper. And there it stood for a while, and ultimately in 1999, the Clinton administration pardoned Flipper

So what we see is over time, attempts have been made to right these wrongs, which have allowed the Army to celebrate Flipper as we should. Lieutenant Colonel Rory McGovern, thank you so much for joining me on American History Tellers. Thank you. It's been a pleasure to be here.

That was my conversation with Lieutenant Colonel Rory McGovern. The book that he co-edited, Race, Politics, and Reconstruction, The First Black Cadets at Old West Point, is available now from the University of Virginia Press. And a note, the views Lieutenant Colonel McGovern expressed in this interview are his own and do not represent the views or official positions of the United States Military Academy or the United States Army.

From Wondery, this is the fourth and final episode of our series on the Buffalo Soldiers for American History Tellers. In our next season, we're bringing you an encore presentation of our series, The Fight for Women's Suffrage.

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