By Tryon Palace
It was a hot July day. Hundreds of men in orderly ranks stood with rifle stocks cradled in sweating palms. Each wore a dark blue wool coat and lighter blue wool trousers. Buttons and belt buckles gleamed in the sunlight, illustrating the prophetic declaration of the Black orator and anti-slavery activist Frederick Douglass: “Let the black man get upon his person the brass letters US, let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth … which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.”
The assembly of the 35th U.S. Colored Troops at the New Bern Academy Green on July 24, 1863, was the outcome of what the late historian Ira Berlin called “not … a single climactic event but … a long process that stretched across a near-century. Freedom’s arrival was not the work of a moment but the product of a movement.”
A movement led by individuals like Abraham Galloway, the self-liberated radical abolitionist and military operative who played a lead role in recruiting enslaved men into Black regiments. William Henry Singleton recruited and trained Black men, drilling them “with cornstalks for guns.” Watching the ranks of blue-uniformed men parade that day in July was Mary Ann Starkey, Black businesswoman and powerbroker between Black leaders and White Union recruiters. She and her fellow members of the Colored Ladies Relief Association had presented the 35th with a silk flag and support in myriad ways.
From the individuals noted in histories to the thousands of tiny moments of resistance across hundreds of years of bondage, the moment of July 24, 1863, was the work of many hands.