Project Traces Black Veterans

A comprehensive new initiative, spearheaded by Du Bois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis Gates, Jr., will attempt to identify black soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War. The project is jointly funded by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, of which Gates is the director, and the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR).

Gates learned that he had a fifth-great-grandfather who served in the Revolutionary War during the filming of “African American Lives,” a series he hosted on PBS this past spring which traced the genealogies of prominent African Americans.

Gates was inducted as a full member of the SAR at the annual congress of the organization on July 10.

It was a complete surprise for Gates to learn that he had a patriot ancestor, and he said this week that he became interested in discovering other black patriot soldiers after filming the series.

“I had no idea that my fifth-great-grandfather [served in the Revolutionary War],” he said. “If that’s true for me that has to be true for a lot of black people around the country.”

Gate’s goals for the project are to recognize the service of black patriots and to diversify the membership of the SAR and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR).

The professional genealogist who traced Gates’ ancestry, Jane E. Ailes, will undertake this new project by comparing the names of the 80,000 soldiers who applied for pensions following the Revolutionary War to census data, which listed individuals as being white, a slave, or a free colored person.

Once Ailes and her staff have gone through the 80,000 pension applications, they will research the genealogies of the black patriots they find to a point where families today should be able to recognize an ancestor of theirs.

“It’s important to find the names and honor the patriots who achieved our nation’s independence,” Joseph W. Dooley, chairman of the SAR’s membership committee, said.

Dooley has been especially involved in efforts to diversify the membership of the SAR—he donated the money to the SAR that was given to the Du Bois Institute to fund the project—and he said that SAR could undertake future projects to discover Native Americans and women who served the patriot cause.

Ailes, who has been working on this project for about a month, said she has already found more than 20 black soldiers, some of whom were previously unknown as being African American.

Through the pension and census records, “there [are] some really fascinating stories that these men have to tell,” she said.

It has generally been believed that about 5,000 African Americans served in the Revolutionary War, and Ailes said she believes that they will find at least that many black soldiers as a result of the project.

“There [are] black veterans, up until now, [who] haven’t gotten much recognition,” she said. “A lot of people [don’t] know that these men served.”

“It’s important that Americans know that black people have been involved in the struggle for liberty since the founding of the Republic and they should be honored and recognized,” Gates said. “What’s more important in the history of America than the Revolutionary War?” he asked rhetorically.

Maria Cole, a member of the Maryland Toaping Castle chapter of the DAR, has traced her ancestry back to two black Revolutionary War soldiers. She said she joined the DAR in 2004 because she felt that the “very least” she could do was honor her ancestors by joining the organization.

“The main reason to join [the DAR] is to honor your ancestors,” she said. “They have every right to be honored like everyone else.”

Her relatives were freemen from North Carolina who were “taking a big chance” by serving in the war. “They could have been caught and had their papers [proving that they were freemen] taken away and [been] sold into slavery,” she said.

Cole serves as a docent at the DAR’s national headquarters in Washington, D.C. so as to show visitors “that there were five thousand-plus African-Americans who served in the Revolution.”

Given the scope of the projects, Ailes said she couldn’t estimate how long it would take to look up the census records of the 80,000 men. “This is a long-term project. It’s not something we can do in a couple of months,” she said.

—Staff writer Brittney L. Moraski can be reached at bmoraski@fas.harvard.edu.