“And then other days were open to Whites.” “There were certain days that Black people could go into studios, and on Thursdays and Saturdays at midday, (they) would say, ‘coloreds only,’” Willis said. So, too, were the war’s makeshift photography studios.
While the Union’s Black soldiers were fighting for the same cause as their White counterparts, their platoons remained segregated.
Portrait of an unidentified African American soldier in uniform, c. Her recently published book, “The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship,” shines a light on these forgotten soldiers and their families through a rich archive of rarely-seen photographs. Many of their individual stories have been lost, but Willis’ research uncovered moving tales of Black love, patriotism and bravery. “They felt the cause was necessary to fight.”īy the end of the war in 1865, 40,000 Black Union soldiers had been killed, of whom three-quarters had died from infection or disease. “When Black soldiers were fighting for their emancipation, they were fighting for not only their own (freedom), but that of their families and other Black people,” Willis said in a video interview. By the end of the war, a tenth of the Union Army was made up of free African American men. But as curator and photographic historian Deborah Willis discovered growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, the Black people who served in the conflict are often ignored by the history books.Īs she would later learn, almost 180,000 Black soldiers fought for the North in the name of ending slavery.
The emancipation of slaves is central to the story of the American Civil War.
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