One hundred years after the battle at Milliken’s Bend, black veterans again found themselves fighting for basic rights of citizenship. We often think of the Civil Rights Movement as a youth-led movement. But in the case of Madison Parish, a more »
It didn’t take long after the end of the Civil War for the white leaders of Monroe, Louisiana, to enact repressive measures against blacks in their midst. Just two months after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, blacks were faced with the more »
Sarah Wadley was a young woman in Monroe, Louisiana. Her father was an official with the Vicksburg, Shreveport, and Texas Railroad, and her position in Monroe society, and its distance from the battlefields, insulated her from the war for a more »
According to the National Park Service’s Soldiers and Sailors System, there were twenty enlisted men named George Washington in the 5th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery. These all would have been black men, the vast majority, former slaves. The 5th U.S. more »
Researching early regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) can sometimes be difficult. Unit names may have changed several times throughout their service. The earliest regiments, organized between the fall of 1862 and the creation of the Bureau of Colored more »