The Haines House Underground Railroad
Museum and the Ohio Humanities Council will present “Black Men in Blue,” a program by Walsh
University professor of history Kelly D. Mazurek, Ph.D., about Ohio’s African
American Civil War soldiers at the
Alliance Area Preservation Society's annual meeting, March 28, 2022 at 6:30 p.m.
The event, which is open to the public, will
be held in the Rodman Library auditorium. A brief membership meeting will
precede the program.
“Black Men in Blue: The Civil War,
Ohioans, and the United States Colored Troops” focuses on the Ohio Black
community’s response to the national conflict, the wartime participation of
free black men, and the impact of their service on white Ohioans. Special
attention is given to the 5th and 27th USCT.
Mazurek’s program is based on her 2016 book
titled For Their Own Cause: The 27th
United States Colored Troops, published by Kent State University Press.
The 27th United States Colored Troops
(USCT), composed largely of free black Ohio men, served in the Union Army from
April 1864 to September 1865 in Virginia and North Carolina. It was the first
time most members of the unit had traveled so far from home. The men faced
daily battles against racism and against inferior treatment, training, and
supplies. They suffered from the physical difficulties of military life, the
horrors of warfare, homesickness and worried about loved ones left at home
without financial support. Yet their contributions provided a tool that allowed
Blacks with little military experience, and their families, to demand social
acceptance and acknowledgment of their citizenship.
Their service did not end when their
enlistment was over. After the men of the 27th returned to Ohio, they and their
families sought full access to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and
compensatory citizenship rights for their collective sacrifice. Despite their
constant battle against racism, this public behavior benefited the men and
their families.
It also meant that the African American
role in the Union victory remained part of local community remembrance and
commemoration. As a result, the experiences of these men from the 27th USCT
gave the late-nineteenth-century Ohio Black community legitimate hopes for
access to equal civil and social rights for all.
For Their Own
Cause
is the first comprehensive history of the 27th USCT. By including rich details
culled from private letters and pension files, Mezurek provides more than a
typical regimental study; she demonstrates that the lives of the men of the
27th USCT help to explain why in the wars that followed, despite the
disappointments and increasingly difficult struggle for African American
equality that continued for far too many decades after the promise of the three
Civil War–era constitutional amendments, Blacks in the United States continued
to offer their martial support in the front lines and the back.
Mezurek is an associate professor at Walsh
University, where she teaches United States history. She is on the advisory
board for the Emerging Civil War Book Series with the Southern Illinois
University Press, is a speaker for the Ohio Humanities Speakers Bureau, and
served as a member of the Ohio CW 150 Advisory Committee.
The program is presented with the support
of the Ohio Humanities Council, and has been arranged through the Ohio
Humanities Council’s Speakers Bureau.