Cadets, Charge Your Glasses for a Toast to Henry O. Flipper

At a time of tumult over race and diversity in the federal government and on our campuses, these columns are glad to learn that the United States Military Academy at West Point will be carrying on with the tradition of honoring its first Black graduate, Henry O. Flipper. He was the Army’s first Black commissioned officer. The annual banquet honoring Flipper is slated to be held on February 20, an academy press officer tells the Sun. That prospect might have been called into doubt as a result of President Trump’s directive ordering the end of all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs within the federal government. The White House, too, has “laid out a blueprint to eliminate all race-based and sex-based preference within the military and the Defense Department,” the Washington Post reports. It marks an executive order headlined “Restoring America’s Fighting Force.”Following those marching orders from the commander in chief, West Point “shut down a dozen extracurricular and social clubs for cadets centered around gender, race and ethnicity,” the Post added. Organizations including the Latin Culture Club and the Society of Women Engineers, the Post reported, were told to strike their tents amid a larger review to ensure that some 100 clubs at the academy were in line with presidential directives.In the wake of these closures some have accused the Pentagon and Secretary Hegseth of the very divisiveness that Mr. Hegseth seeks to end. The secretary addressed the concern at a recent DoD town hall, when he said that “we will treat everyone equally, we will treat everyone with fairness, we will treat everyone with respect, and we will judge you as an individual by your merit, and by your commitment to the team and the mission.”By those criteria the cadets at West Point could hardly do better than Henry O. Flipper and his courage and persistence. Born a slave in 1856, Flipper was the sixth black cadet to be accepted at West Point, but became in 1877 the first one to graduate. When he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States army — the first Black officer in any branch of the military — it was a milestone for racial progress.Flipper went on to be the first Black officer “to command regular troops,” West Point reports, when he assumed command of a unit that was among those to become known as Buffalo Soldiers. They earned their moniker from the Plains Indians. Such regiments endured until the Korean War era, when, in a fell swoop, President Truman desegregated America’s armed forces. He decreed an equality “without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”That vision was but a glimmer in Flipper’s era at the academy, when Cadet Flipper “endured pervasive silence from his peers, leading to a profound sense of isolation,” West Point reports. The cadet later reflected on the experience, lamenting that “There was no society for me to enjoy — no friends, male or female, for me to visit, or with whom I could have any social intercourse, so absolute was my isolation.” Flipper didn’t live to see Truman’s desegregation order. He died in 1940 after a career with unanticipated vicissitudes. In 1881, he “was accused of embezzling $3,000 in commissary funds,” the academy says. A court martial acquitted him. Yet he was dishonorably discharged in 1882 for what the academy describes as “conduct unbecoming.” Posthumously, President Carter gave him an honorable discharge, and President Clinton pardoned him.Flipper’s achievement as a trailblazer shines brighter than ever, and it’s newsworthy that the banquet in his honor will take place. It’s a reminder of the extent to which cadets of all races and ancestries are inspired by the unity of which Secretary Hegseth spoke and by the courage that Henry Flipper embodied. So let’s charge our glasses and join the cadets in honoring, in Henry O. Flipper, one of our military academies’ most inspiring graduates.

Cadets, Charge Your Glasses for a Toast to Henry O. Flipper

Cadets, Charge Your Glasses for a Toast to Henry O. Flipper

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