Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,345

This is the grave of James Gibson.

James Gibson was a Buffalo Soldier. About all I know about him comes from this image from the guide to this cemetery, nicely provided by the cemetery’s historical association. I obviously didn’t go to this cemetery to see this person, but you never know what you might find.

So I can’t say anything about Gibson per se, but I can talk a bit about the so-called Buffalo Soldiers.

The Buffalo Soldiers came out of the all-Black regiments in the Union Army in the second half of the Civil War. The name of course comes out of the genocidal wars against the tribes in the 1870s. Whether it was the Cheyenne or Comanche who came up with the term, which is debated, it doesn’t really matter. The military was strictly segregated, but it was also one of the only paths upward for Black men after the war. Quite a few made a career out of it. They were often on the front lines of the genocide, not that they had much choice over the matter. In any case, the fact that they were not white or anything else that most of the tribes knew–Mexican for instance–surprised them and thus the name, comparing the hair of the soldiers to the bison.

By the 1890s, when Gibson joined the military, the wars of genocide were largely over and the more passive genocide had begun. But there was still a need for Black soldiers in the military. Quite a few joined during the Spanish-American War, one of America’s many unjust conflicts, in this case a colonialist enterprise to turn the U.S. into an imperialist country. This description of Gibson and the other soldiers buried nearby is pretty generic and does not tell us whether they specifically fought at San Juan Hill in Cuba or in the Philippines. Might have been both, more likely it was one of them. What we can say is that these soldiers were considered on the front lines of the imperialist ideology for more reasons than them just being soldiers. This was also the age of scientific racism and Black Americans were believed to have greater immunity from tropical diseases than white ones. This was largely not true of course, but they were sent to the tropics in greater numbers than their overall average of about 10 percent of the military at any given time. I should note here as well that despite media slut Theodore Roosevelt creating his own news machine in Cuba to promote himself with his friends back in New York, the Buffalo Soldiers were absolutely critical at San Juan Hill and actually went far to save Roosevelt’s regiment rich people playing cowboys and actual cowboys known as The Rough Riders. Jack Pershing, among others, noted how bravely those soldiers fought. The cause was of course horrible, but when profiling the everyday soldiers, especially those who are also oppressed at home, you have to kind of let that go a bit. After all, they weren’t like Roosevelt, actively promoting imperialism.

James Gibson is buried in Memory Hill Cemetery, Milledgeville, Georgia. Interestingly, this was not a segregated cemetery, as you can see from the other people listed on that historical pamphlet, though I didn’t visit any of them.

If you would like this series to visit other Buffalo Soldiers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here and maybe we can go into more details on individuals. Medal of Honor winner William H. Tompkins is in San Francisco, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.