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  • Black Cadet in a White Bastion: Charles Young at West Point
  • Frank N. Schubert
Black Cadet in a White Bastion: Charles Young at West Point. By Brian G. Shellum. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8032-9315-1. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xix, 175. $16.95.

Brian Shellum considers Colonel Charles Young an "important black military trailblazer," who achieved "a measure of greatness," during the Jim Crow era (p. xvi), with "a long and distinguished career in the military" (p. 138). "This book," Shellum writes, "is the first serious effort to garner details of Young's conduct and experiences at the academy" (p. xiv). [End Page 849]

The author crams many details about Young's family, childhood, and West Point years into this book, delighted to have the letters of a member of his class, "full of the minutiae of daily cadet life" (p. 57). Shellum even regrets that the long-time academy barber "did not put pen to paper [to recount] the stories he heard from cadets he served for more than thirteen years" (p. 100). Where he lacks details, he guesses at them, qualified by the usual words—"probably," "may have," "likely," and "doubtless," all of which were deployed in a single paragraph (p. 35) reconstructing Young's 1884 itinerary from Ohio to New York. Overall, this is a minutiae-laden anecdotal history of cadet life during the 1880s, with Charles Young included.

We do come away with some sense of young Charles. He entered West Point in 1884 and took more than five years instead of the usual four to graduate, the third black officer commissioned from the academy and the last until Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., in 1936. Young was intelligent enough to win an appointment but just managed to scrape by. He had special talents for music and languages and could draw: the drawings in this book indicate that his poor grades in this subject were not due to the inadequacy of his work. Young was determined and stubborn enough to withstand isolation and hostility for five years.

Young accumulated massive numbers of demerits during his first three years, keeping him near the brink of expulsion, but then the numbers declined. Shellum thinks this is "perhaps a sign of grudging acceptance by the corps" (p. 101). Or maybe white cadets tired of harassing the stubborn Young, who persevered, despite efforts to make him miserable. His worst year was 1887–88, because the other black cadet, John H. Alexander, had graduated. He continued to struggle academically and graduated at the end of the summer of 1889 after making up a deficiency in engineering, number 49 out of 49. Shellum's claim that he was an "intellectual," a visionary who carried the "dreams of African Americans throughout the country" (p. xvi), finds no support in this narrative.

Young was a trailblazer, the only black regular officer for nearly a decade and the first black colonel, but his line service and obscure foreign postings do not amount to a "distinguished" career. In any case, no officer's cadet years merit an entire book. For this period, see David P. Kilroy, For Race and Country: The Life and Career of Colonel Charles Young (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), whose chapter "Alone at West Point" tells us as much as most people would want to know about Young's undergraduate years.

Frank N. Schubert
Mt. Vernon, Virginia
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