Biography
Flipper was born into slavery in Thomasville, Georgia the eldest of five brothers. His mother, Isabelle Flipper, and his father, Festus Flipper, a shoemaker and carriage-trimmer, were owned by Ephraim G. Ponder, a wealthy slave dealer.
Flipper attended Atlanta University during Reconstruction. There, as a freshman, Representative James C. Freeman appointed him to attend West Point, where there were already four other black cadets. The small group had a difficult time at the academy, where they were rejected by white students. Nevertheless, Flipper persevered and in 1877 became the first of the group to graduate,earning a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army cavalry. He was assigned to the 10th Cavalry Regiment, one of the four all-black Buffalo Soldier regiments in the army, and became the first black officer to command regular troops in the U.S. Army. (Previously all-black regiments were led by white officers).
Read more about this topic: Henry Ossian Flipper
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“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)