VICKSBURG, Miss. (AP) — Thelma Sims Dukes grew up during the 1940s and ’50s in a segregated Mississippi town steeped in Civil War history.
As a small Black girl, she would walk to school through Vicksburg National Military Park — the hilly battlefield where Union and Confederate soldiers fought and died over whether the U.S. would continue allowing slavery in the South.
Union forces won a pivotal campaign to capture the town of Vicksburg and gain control of the Mississippi River in 1863, hastening the war’s end. But during Dukes’ childhood, Vicksburg venerated the Confederacy and ignored the history of Black soldiers who fought for the Union, including her great-great grandfather, William “Bill” Sims.
“The superintendents and the museum curators — they said we didn’t fight in the Civil War,” Dukes said recently.
The Black soldiers’ valor and service to the country is no longer ignored, thanks to the efforts of historians, park employees and citizens like Dukes. On crisp morning in mid-February, Dukes and her niece, Sara Sims, and four park employees — two of them Black men wearing reproductions of U.S. Army uniforms from the Civil War — placed American flags on 13 graves where recently identified Black soldiers are buried in Vicksburg National Cemetery, which is part of the military park.
A historian working for the military park, Beth Kruse, identified the soldiers through research of military records, newspapers and other sources. Their remains lie beneath white marble headstones carved with numbers rather than names, as are most veterans buried in the cemetery.
In recent years, the National Park Service has broadened how it presents history in parks nationwide. The Vicksburg military park, which is dotted with more than 1,400 monuments, markers and tablets and is one of the largest tourist attractions in Mississippi, drawing visitors from around the globe. Its visitor center now includes information about Black history, and a monument to Black soldiers was dedicated 20 years ago.
Sunlight dappled the graves under a towering magnolia tree during the flag-planting ceremony on Feb. 14. Dukes said the men and other Black Union soldiers were “freedom
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